I chase ideas provided they work. When they don’t work, I say, look, this idea maybe sounds bright, but let’s try something that works.
THE PUBLIC POLICY achievements of Singapore are not to be mooted simply because of its size—brains count, Lee is right. Even so, even brains aren’t enough by themselves. Though more populated than Los Angeles, LKY’s home country is perhaps but a third the population of Shanghai, as the late Deng Xiaoping famously suggested to him. The population of New Delhi, the capital of India, is approximately three times Singapore’s. Imagine what it would be like to have to be the Big Bad Nanny over a place like India!
So I ask him that. I put it to him straight: “But could you have done it in India?”
“In India?”
“Could you have done India?”
“No.”
I thought that a rather direct answer: “But why?”
“It’s an established ancient civilization. Nehru and Gandhi had a chance because of their enormous prestige, but they couldn’t break the caste system. They could not break the habits.”
Notice he didn’t mention the size-of-population issue.
To LKY an inherited culture is sort of like a country’s DNA. To change it almost requires laser surgery. Cultures that evolve to changes in circumstances and challenges can thrive; those that do not, fall behind. In a famous and influential 1994 interview with Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Affairs, the semi-official journal of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, Lee spelled out his Toynbeeesque view that culture is destiny. That’s why he often admonishes critics to understand a country’s ‘starting place’.
So I venture this: “But the great Nehru added to the problem of India because he was stuck on an idea: Soviet central planning!”
“Yeah, he was.”
“But you would have dropped that in three months?”
He nods, as if sure: “You see, he was stuck on big ideas. He went for ideas. I chase ideas provided they work. When they don’t work, I say, look, this idea maybe sounds bright, but let’s try something that works. So we try something that works, let’s get it going.”
If you believe in numbers as a fully satisfying measurement of true achievement, Singapore under Lee and his successors has been using ideas that work for decades. Consider that in 2008, the per capita income of India was US$2,900, number 167 in the world. But Singapore’s was US$51,600, eighth in the world. The U.S. number—and this surprised me—was but tenth, at US$47,500. Over the decades Singapore put a lot of policy stuff into successful motion.
I say: “Your aide and I were talking about the glorious gardens here in Istana, and looking at them as little laboratories. You bring some little plant in and if it dies, you don’t try to plant them elsewhere in the country, right? Didn’t work, don’t do it. But Nehru, was he someone who was too much of a Hedgehog, perhaps stuck on big ideas?”
LKY tilts his head slightly downward: “I don’t know whether he is a Hedgehog, but he is a man who plays with ideas, you know, ‘Non-Aligned Third World’, not committed to either side when, in fact, he was committed to the Soviet side in the end, because you need advanced-technology weaponry, and so he chose to criticize America. He didn’t get on with John Kennedy; you remember the famous interchange: Kennedy showed him how the wealthy lived in America, grand buildings, et cetera, and Nehru was unimpressed. I mean, I would not have been un-impressed! So, he’s a different man, his mental make-up. So, he writes books, he writes beautiful books. He’s an anti-colonialist, he’s a freedom fighter, but what do you do with freedom? What is it that your people want?”
This is a key cry with LKY. What do people really want?
He continues: “Gandhi’s idea was to give them back the village, the spinning wheel. Well, I mean, that’s going to get you nowhere in this Industrial Age.”
But this is getting us somewhere: “You say at one point, what do people want? Do they want food on the table, a car, a home, or they want the right to write any editorial in a newspaper? And then you say, I know what they want. You say they want reality, not concepts. That’s your view. But, even so, Nehru was a great man.”
India today is increasingly important to Lee’s Singapore. Nobody in the region wants to bet everything on China. He picks through foreign policy options the way a NASCAR driver plots out an upcoming race. The main concern is not what happens if everything goes right, but what the options are at any given point when things go wrong (as sometimes they do). If Singapore puts all its diplomatic chips on giant China, which then turns angrily on its smallest neighbors (or internally implodes, which has happened before, and could happen again—let’s face it), what is its way out of the box it put itself in? Lee knows that without India actively involved in Southeast Asia, ASEAN alone cannot hope to stand against China on any important issue.
I chase ideas provided they work. When they don’t work, I say, look, this idea maybe sounds bright, but let’s try something that works.
Lee shrugs as we review all this geopolitical landscape. Without exchanging a word, we accept that China will probably hold to ‘peaceful rising’, in Beijing’s stilted mantra. Or that view could prove naïve and it might wake up one day and follow in the footsteps of any number of giants in history and start eating up tiny neighbors.
This is where India might come in handy. It’s not hard to follow Lee’s crisp logic.
“Who is the counterweight? Japan cannot be the counterweight. It has not got enough bodies. Together Japan and America, yes, can be a counterweight, economically and physically, and militarily, but who is the X counterweight within Asia, because America may, in 100, 200 years, become less able to dominate Asia. But the Indians are here for keeps.”
The former prime minister explains the hedging strategy: “So, we developed relations with India. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [India’s brainy prime minister] and I have been trying to get Indians into [the political community of] Southeast Asia for decades, from Mrs. Indira Gandhi onwards, but they were always too preoccupied with Pakistan. So, Manmohan Singh, as finance minister, faced his problems and his kitty was running very low, foreign exchange...”
“You mean in the 1990s?”
“Yes. So, he changed economic strategy, and came here, together with his trade minister, who is now home minister, Chidambaram, and says, will you endorse this [such-and-such a finance program] because if we endorse it, it becomes more credible. So, I said, yes, of course. So, we developed that relationship and we gradually brought them into ASEAN as a dialogue partner on equal terms with China. Then for the East Asia Summit, which the Chinese were going to dominate, we brought the Indians and the Australians and the New Zealanders for balance. So, they know that we are their friends.”
Returning to the Indians, he expresses satisfaction at Singapore’s steady development of a solid bilateral relationship to offset a possible (if so far only theoretical) unpleasant China syndrome. But this get-it-done man, even in his mid-eighties, hasn’t slowed down enough to tolerate one of India’s least endearing traits: a bureaucracy that moves with the approximate speed of a backlash of taffy.
“So, we’ve got access to them,” he nearly groans, “but unfortunately, their bureaucracy is so slow.”
“Yeah, it’s amazing.”
“So many things we could do with them are not being done.”
I don’t mention it to LKY, but one difference between his country and India is that for the former, which is a relatively progressive society, the default position for trying anything new seems to have been a ‘yes’. But for India, which is relatively traditional, the default appears to remain a ‘no’.
Then I slip into the role of agent provocateur, saying sarcastically: “But India’s a democracy.”
“So?”
This—Occidental fans of the Orient—was not ‘so’ as in ‘ah so’. It was ‘so’ as in ‘so what?’ I am telling you, dear reader, Thomas Jefferson does not live in the Istana. Neither (for you political philosopher fans) does John Rawls. So who does? My answer comes later.
If morally or religiously you believe that one-man, one-vote is axiomatically the correct system, are you prepared to pay a ‘democracy tax’? Even in the best run of them, you have to incur a substantial inefficiency (and, unusually, corruption) deficit. This is not to suggest that a suffocating bureaucracy is the inevitable concomitant of a democratic system: to be sure, sludge-filled bureaucracies are scarcely the monopoly of democracies; they can breed like cancer in autocracies just as pathologically.
India’s bureaucracy, though, is pretty much the stuff of legend; what’s amazing is that democratically elected figures like Manmohan Singh manage to achieve as much as they do in the face of a system that, culturally and dynamically, has more respect for the past than the future.
We go on: “So, now fast forward, the next decade, after he visited you, he then becomes prime minister. Is he just a puppet?”
Lee saying: “He is there on the support of Mrs. Sonia Gandhi but, no, no, he is not a puppet. When Sonia Gandhi hesitated about the very big nuclear deal with America, he said, I will resign if you don’t support it. So, she supported him.”
“And he got it.” India is receiving oodles of nuclear technology from Uncle Sam.
“And he got it and that was a good move.”
“Is it a good move for America too, do you think?” Many Americans opposed it because of blanket opposition to the spread of nuclear technology. You might even call the opponents the ayatollahs of nuclear proliferation doctrine.
“Yes, surely.” Lee is not one for doctrine. Or for ayatollahs, especially of the academic kind.
“So, that is where you put pragmatics over ideology?”
“Yes, of course.”