Singapore Foreign Affairs Minister George Yeo meets his counterpart, Condoleezza Rice. |
A graduate of both Cambridge University and Harvard Business School, George Yeo has been Minister for Foreign Affairs since 2004. Previously, he held a number of senior government posts, including Minister of State for Finance, Minister for Information & the Arts, and Minister for Trade & Industry. Our team spoke with him on a range of topics, from US-Singapore relations to the war on terrorism. Excerpts:
QUESTION: Regarding current US-Singapore relations. When the US speaks of its allies in Asia, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand always come up. In fact Singapore has been a close friend of the US for many years. Would you like to see Singapore have a higher profile in the minds of Americans? Or simply keep Singapore’s preference for a low profile?
Min Yeo: It’s not entirely a low profile because the cooperation we have with the US in strategic military matters is known to the general public. It’s been fully disclosed to our parliament. And it’s been a very good relationship, mutually beneficial and good for the region. But we’ve never been a treaty ally in the sense that Thailand and the Philippines remain treaty allies with the US. But it’s a term which is a holdover from the previous era of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) as an analogue to NATO.
We have always been more a part of the British sphere, and when the former British colonies in Southeast Asia became independent, we retained our old links to Britain, Australia and New Zealand. So we had the Five Power Defense Arrangement, which is the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore. We kept that treaty arrangement and have never become part of the US sphere but we do have very good relations.
Q: So you would like to keep it in the same stance rather than increase the profile of the relationship? It’s more of a softly-softly approach, would you say?
Min Yeo: Not in the sense that we’re trying to hide anything, because what we do here, we do in a very transparent way. We have a new naval base near Changi Airport which was built big enough to accommodate US aircraft carriers alongside. It’s a facility which is open to all powers in the region. But of course, it’s the US which has the need for such a length of wharfage.
And our non-American friends also watch us closely and know exactly what we’re doing. It’s not a secret. So it’s not as if softly-softly because it’s hidey-hidey. Not at all. We’re too small and we have too many friends to be able to do things in a surreptitious way. It’s not possible. Whether it’s our links to Israel or our links to Taiwan, whatever we do, we lay it out in what we hope is a publicly defensible way to all parties concerned. It makes our life more comfortable.
It’s also important for our credibility, that we deal with everyone honestly and above board. We are what we are and when we take a position, it is a position that we take publicly.
Q: One of the most crucial political questions facing the West today is how to deal with the Islamic world; how to support and encourage moderate followers of Islam, while isolating fundamental extremists. Singapore has had considerable experience in dealing with Islamic nations across Southeast Asia; could Singapore point out possible ways to open up new dialogue and try to solve the huge socio-political rift that has caused so much tragedy?
Minister Yeo: No, we don’t have such influence. We are very realistic about the kind of influence we wield in the world and we know that we have not solved the problem you have posed even within Singapore itself. So our approach is to manage our own problem first, that is, Islamic extremism. And it is a complex problem which requires on our part a response which is multifaceted and long-term. This is a phenomenon of history, the response of a civilization to the challenges of modernization.
Within Singapore, where people live cheek by jowl because it is a small island, the Muslims are a significant minority. In every school, residential area, workplace, army camp, we are mixed. So we have come to the conclusion that in responding to this problem, we have to understand it in detail, both the phenomenon in Singapore and the phenomenon as it has evolved in the much larger Islamic world. We can defuse the bombs, we can catch individuals, we can repair damaged areas, but at the core of it is the fight against Islamic extremism and that cannot be accomplished by non-Muslims. It is a debate, a furious debate, within Islam itself and at its highest reaches, a debate among its religious leaders as to what Islam constitutes. The extremism we are seeing is a mutation; it is abhorrent behavior, which by hiding behind Islamic precepts conceals its extreme views in legitimate beliefs. It is like a cancer where the malignant cells mimic the good cells and therefore prevent the normal immune system from combating it.
It is a complicated problem. When we first arrested, after September 11, a number of Al Qaeda types, our security agencies were at a loss how to deal with them, because they were in their own world. You couldn’t convince them that they were wrong. So almost in despair, we asked some of our ulamas if they could go in and talk to them. And the ulamas were initially suspicious, wondering why the Home Ministry should suddenly want them to talk to the detainees. Anyway they couldn’t say no so they went in and after a while, they discovered that something horrible had happened. The detainees’ minds had been captured in the name of the true belief. The ulamas had theological debates, like medieval Christian debates, with the detainees, and sometimes each side wrote its arguments on paper and responded to one another. The ulamas succeeded in turning a few over, but not many. But it achieved an inoculation effect on the Muslim population, because when they went out and started talking to the other Muslim religious leaders saying, “Something terrible has happened to our religion! We’ve got to find out what has gone wrong and make sure that we contain the problem.” So without our intending it, word spread to the mosques and Madrasahs that “Look, unless we take defensive action, this thing can harm us gravely.” As a result of this, we have a situation in Singapore where the religious leaders openly cooperate with the Home Ministry, openly declare that terrorism is wrong and put out banners outside some of the mosques to say that Islam is against terrorism.
It will take time and it’s a slow, grinding process, but it is part of the dynamic within Islam itself. It’s different in every Muslim community. What we can do is to manage the problem well in Singapore and to exchange views and share experiences with other countries and learn from one another. That’s what we can do. But we’re in no position to tell others what to do. We’re in no position to prescribe to others but we can work to maintain harmony here. All throughout the island, we have created harmony circles where we conduct very honest exchanges as to what the problems are.
Q: You say that you haven’t solved your own problems internally, that it’s an ongoing situation. But you have a Muslim component and you’re dealing with it very well. There’s much that America could learn from Singapore?
Minister Yeo: It’s an experiment. Whether in the long-term it will succeed or not, only time will tell. But I suppose if you were a scholar, if you were a policy maker, you would want to study this experiment as you would want to study other experiments in the world.
Q: In the past, the image of the US in the world has been quite good, especially from the 1940s till the 1990s, when vast American investments helped launch and sustain the huge Asian economy and caused an economic boom. But today, America’s status has fallen considerably among friends as well as foes. Many Americans are shocked by this turn of events. Do you think that this decline is only short term?
Minister Yeo: It is true there is an image problem today worldwide, but I would not describe it as a decline of America in the world. I think that your country has an amazing ability to renew itself. It goes through periods of cynicism, of self-doubt, but somehow deep in the bowels of the system it is able to clean things up and rebuild. We see it again and again and again. After severe challenges, it bounces back with great vigor. I remember the time not so long ago when Japan was being touted as number one. When I was studying at the Harvard Business School in the mid-‘80s, it seemed as if the US was in irreversible decline. But in the ‘90s with the IT revolution and Silicon Valley, the US streaked ahead of its rivals. It was Japan which went through ten years of depression.
So I would never write off the US because the nature of the society itself provides for renewal. Its ability to bring in talent, integrate them, make them feel that they have a fair crack at opportunities and the best jobs. That’s a great strength of the American system. Of course it’s true that in the overall scheme of things, there will be many powers in the world. It is not going to be a unipolar world. For a long time it was a bipolar world during the Cold War, then when the Soviet Union collapsed, for a period of time the US was the sole hyper-power. But that was an aberration. Looking ahead, it’s going to be a more multipolar world, messier, and even the small countries will resent being dominated by big countries. So instead of a hierarchical approach, we’ve all got to work within networks now. The US will always have the densest network in the world. But you’re going to find the Chinese, the Indians and, to a certain extent, the Brazilians and a re-emerging Russia, also having their own networks.
Q: So you are very optimistic.
Minister Yeo: No, I’m being realistic and it’s on this basis that we do our own national planning. |
