January 4, 2017 4:00 pm JST
Christopher Tremewan
[h=1]Singapore needs new diplomatic strategy[/h] Shifts in Chinese and American power have thrown balancing role into question
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte inspects an honour guard with Singapore's President Tony Tan at the Istana in Singapore on Dec. 15. (Reuters)
Singapore may get back its nine military vehicles that were seized in Hong Kong in November but whether it can regain credibility within Southeast Asia as a diplomatic leader is another question. Singapore's carefully crafted reputation as an advocate of Asian values and vigorous defender of its neighbors' sovereignty holding the line against an imperial West is long out of date.
China returned the U.S. underwater drone it seized on Dec. 15 within days but is making Singapore wait weeks for the armored vehicles impounded Nov. 23 as undeclared cargo from a transiting freight liner. The debate within the Singapore elite is whether this is a blip in a long-established friendship or if it indicates a "new normal" with a rising China that will require Singapore, whose populace is 78% ethnic Chinese, to show greater loyalty.
However the current standoff is resolved, there will be no going back to the old status quo. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's telephone call with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has given the region a serious headache as governments ponder what his policies toward Asia will be.
Singapore was already vulnerable. The city-state has been slow in adjusting its diplomatic strategy even as its Southeast Asian neighbors accommodate themselves to China's rising power. Singapore now has to adapt amid a highly fluid situation in which it has already been weakened by China's rap on the knuckles over its continued military links with Taiwan.
Can Singapore still perform its role as the preferred neutral broker for members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations? Can it keep up its balancing act between China and the U.S. and be the interlocutor for ASEAN while China raises the tightrope higher and removes the safety net? Is Singapore moving from interlocutor to itself becoming a mere bargaining chip?
As Bilahari Kausikan, a Singaporean ambassador-at-large, recently observed: "No one who is even minimally familiar with our neighbors should have any illusions... They mean to surpass us and put us in what they consider to be our proper place, which is not, believe me, where the sun shines on first."
He sees Singapore's strategy of military deterrence of its neighbors as the essential underpinning of its diplomatic leadership. Indeed, Singapore's military expenditure per capita is second only to the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific region and far more than that of any other country.
Kausikan's fear is that "the central organizing concept of [Singapore's] civil service is eroding the alertness, agility and appreciation of nuance that we will need to cope with a more complex external environment." He does not point directly at where the responsibility for this actually lies -- the leadership of Singapore's ruling party, in power since 1959.
New attitude
In July, China rejected an international tribunal's decision regarding its territorial claims in the South China Sea in favor of the Philippines. In August, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that his country had no claims in the South China Sea but added, "We do have a lot at stake and three things matter to us: international law, freedom of navigation and a united ASEAN."
He had just returned from a visit to Washington during which he was feted at the last state dinner to be hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama. Lee had every reason to be optimistic about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and continued U.S. backing for Singapore's prominent role in Southeast Asia.
In October, however, a senior Chinese military adviser said Singapore should be made to "pay the price for seriously damaging China's interests." Jin Yinan, director of the strategic research institute at National Defense University, said that Lee had focused his speech at the prestigious Shangri-La Dialogue on international security in Singapore in June mainly and unsympathetically on the South China Sea. He added that Lee's father, late elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew, had lost Beijing's respect over his support for Obama's pivot to Asia.
Since his U.S. trip, Lee has been confronted with an unravelling of Singapore's regional role at the hands of China and of some of his ASEAN partners. Not only has Singapore's primary defense partnership with the U.S. been sharply exposed but its ASEAN partners have been peeled off by Beijing. Mercurial Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and politically weakened Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak appear to have found solace in Beijing's embrace, further fragmenting ASEAN's response to China's expansionism.
Damaged reputation
What kind of leadership can a damaged Singapore with decreasing leverage offer?
Singapore's pragmatic foreign policy in ASEAN has been successful. Acting as banker to Southeast Asian elites and not challenging their failures in governance have assisted the city-state's transition from intermediate manufacturing and entrepot trade to a services economy. Now just as Singapore is losing its competitiveness in manufacturing, ease of doing business and attracting talent, it has to find a new diplomatic strategy for regional leadership.
Ethnic politics will play a big part. China sees Singapore as a Chinese country. So do its neighbors in the populous Malay archipelago. Singapore has maintained it is a multiracial meritocracy while bringing in at least 1 million mainland Chinese immigrants to shore up ethnic Chinese dominance. With 80% of its oil imports passing through the Malacca Straits, China is naturally sensitive to the geostrategic chokepoint around Singapore as well as the presence of the U.S. Navy.
China has many ways to bypass Singapore: its pending investment in Thailand's planned Kra Isthmus Canal; its own Belt and Road Initiative to develop infrastructure and transport connections to Europe and the Middle East; the opening of the Arctic route to Europe; and its joint development of the Gwadar deep-water port in Pakistan with road, rail and pipeline connections.
Undermining tiny Singapore will take time. The diminution of the city-state's regional leadership is likely to continue to be gradual, Trump willing, so there is time for it to recoup losses.
It is difficult to see how Singapore can deepen its leadership of Southeast Asia without stepping back from its rather arrogant exceptionalism. It has spent decades leveraging the weaknesses of its neighbors rather than assisting in the buildup of their institutions. It has taken a business approach to international relations as it has tried to become the Switzerland of Southeast Asia.
Having achieved that dubious aim economically, it is now tasting the fruit: an inequitable and predatory society in a region where it tries both to belong and to declare its superiority. The result, as Amb. Kausikan has noted, is that it is not loved by its neighbors and if social surveys are indicative, its own citizens have lost affection too. Yet as a society, Singapore has many strengths and could change tack with imaginative political leadership.
Singapore's low-key response to Hong Kong's seizure of its military vehicles may succeed in keeping the diplomatic temperature down. The city-state will probably get its property back after China has extracted more embarrassment.
We can then expect Singapore quietly to increase cooperation with the PLA and possibly gesture more strongly toward the Belt and Road Initiative. Singapore will maintain its high military spending, its hosting of the U.S. Navy and extend its offshore military training in Australia and elsewhere.
But the larger questions of Singapore's leadership within ASEAN, its own uncertain political succession and the contrariness of the incoming American leadership have given Beijing more than enough leverage to shift regional leadership in its favor.
In this context, there is little indication yet that Singapore, or anyone else, knows how to shore up the increasingly contingent nature of the three things that Prime Minister Lee said mattered: international law, freedom of navigation and a united ASEAN.
Christopher Tremewan is a research fellow in political studies at the University of Auckland and author of "The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore."
Christopher Tremewan
[h=1]Singapore needs new diplomatic strategy[/h] Shifts in Chinese and American power have thrown balancing role into question
Singapore may get back its nine military vehicles that were seized in Hong Kong in November but whether it can regain credibility within Southeast Asia as a diplomatic leader is another question. Singapore's carefully crafted reputation as an advocate of Asian values and vigorous defender of its neighbors' sovereignty holding the line against an imperial West is long out of date.
China returned the U.S. underwater drone it seized on Dec. 15 within days but is making Singapore wait weeks for the armored vehicles impounded Nov. 23 as undeclared cargo from a transiting freight liner. The debate within the Singapore elite is whether this is a blip in a long-established friendship or if it indicates a "new normal" with a rising China that will require Singapore, whose populace is 78% ethnic Chinese, to show greater loyalty.
However the current standoff is resolved, there will be no going back to the old status quo. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's telephone call with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has given the region a serious headache as governments ponder what his policies toward Asia will be.
Singapore was already vulnerable. The city-state has been slow in adjusting its diplomatic strategy even as its Southeast Asian neighbors accommodate themselves to China's rising power. Singapore now has to adapt amid a highly fluid situation in which it has already been weakened by China's rap on the knuckles over its continued military links with Taiwan.
Can Singapore still perform its role as the preferred neutral broker for members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations? Can it keep up its balancing act between China and the U.S. and be the interlocutor for ASEAN while China raises the tightrope higher and removes the safety net? Is Singapore moving from interlocutor to itself becoming a mere bargaining chip?
As Bilahari Kausikan, a Singaporean ambassador-at-large, recently observed: "No one who is even minimally familiar with our neighbors should have any illusions... They mean to surpass us and put us in what they consider to be our proper place, which is not, believe me, where the sun shines on first."
He sees Singapore's strategy of military deterrence of its neighbors as the essential underpinning of its diplomatic leadership. Indeed, Singapore's military expenditure per capita is second only to the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific region and far more than that of any other country.
Kausikan's fear is that "the central organizing concept of [Singapore's] civil service is eroding the alertness, agility and appreciation of nuance that we will need to cope with a more complex external environment." He does not point directly at where the responsibility for this actually lies -- the leadership of Singapore's ruling party, in power since 1959.
New attitude
In July, China rejected an international tribunal's decision regarding its territorial claims in the South China Sea in favor of the Philippines. In August, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that his country had no claims in the South China Sea but added, "We do have a lot at stake and three things matter to us: international law, freedom of navigation and a united ASEAN."
He had just returned from a visit to Washington during which he was feted at the last state dinner to be hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama. Lee had every reason to be optimistic about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and continued U.S. backing for Singapore's prominent role in Southeast Asia.
In October, however, a senior Chinese military adviser said Singapore should be made to "pay the price for seriously damaging China's interests." Jin Yinan, director of the strategic research institute at National Defense University, said that Lee had focused his speech at the prestigious Shangri-La Dialogue on international security in Singapore in June mainly and unsympathetically on the South China Sea. He added that Lee's father, late elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew, had lost Beijing's respect over his support for Obama's pivot to Asia.
Since his U.S. trip, Lee has been confronted with an unravelling of Singapore's regional role at the hands of China and of some of his ASEAN partners. Not only has Singapore's primary defense partnership with the U.S. been sharply exposed but its ASEAN partners have been peeled off by Beijing. Mercurial Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and politically weakened Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak appear to have found solace in Beijing's embrace, further fragmenting ASEAN's response to China's expansionism.
Damaged reputation
What kind of leadership can a damaged Singapore with decreasing leverage offer?
Singapore's pragmatic foreign policy in ASEAN has been successful. Acting as banker to Southeast Asian elites and not challenging their failures in governance have assisted the city-state's transition from intermediate manufacturing and entrepot trade to a services economy. Now just as Singapore is losing its competitiveness in manufacturing, ease of doing business and attracting talent, it has to find a new diplomatic strategy for regional leadership.
Ethnic politics will play a big part. China sees Singapore as a Chinese country. So do its neighbors in the populous Malay archipelago. Singapore has maintained it is a multiracial meritocracy while bringing in at least 1 million mainland Chinese immigrants to shore up ethnic Chinese dominance. With 80% of its oil imports passing through the Malacca Straits, China is naturally sensitive to the geostrategic chokepoint around Singapore as well as the presence of the U.S. Navy.
China has many ways to bypass Singapore: its pending investment in Thailand's planned Kra Isthmus Canal; its own Belt and Road Initiative to develop infrastructure and transport connections to Europe and the Middle East; the opening of the Arctic route to Europe; and its joint development of the Gwadar deep-water port in Pakistan with road, rail and pipeline connections.
Undermining tiny Singapore will take time. The diminution of the city-state's regional leadership is likely to continue to be gradual, Trump willing, so there is time for it to recoup losses.
It is difficult to see how Singapore can deepen its leadership of Southeast Asia without stepping back from its rather arrogant exceptionalism. It has spent decades leveraging the weaknesses of its neighbors rather than assisting in the buildup of their institutions. It has taken a business approach to international relations as it has tried to become the Switzerland of Southeast Asia.
Having achieved that dubious aim economically, it is now tasting the fruit: an inequitable and predatory society in a region where it tries both to belong and to declare its superiority. The result, as Amb. Kausikan has noted, is that it is not loved by its neighbors and if social surveys are indicative, its own citizens have lost affection too. Yet as a society, Singapore has many strengths and could change tack with imaginative political leadership.
Singapore's low-key response to Hong Kong's seizure of its military vehicles may succeed in keeping the diplomatic temperature down. The city-state will probably get its property back after China has extracted more embarrassment.
We can then expect Singapore quietly to increase cooperation with the PLA and possibly gesture more strongly toward the Belt and Road Initiative. Singapore will maintain its high military spending, its hosting of the U.S. Navy and extend its offshore military training in Australia and elsewhere.
But the larger questions of Singapore's leadership within ASEAN, its own uncertain political succession and the contrariness of the incoming American leadership have given Beijing more than enough leverage to shift regional leadership in its favor.
In this context, there is little indication yet that Singapore, or anyone else, knows how to shore up the increasingly contingent nature of the three things that Prime Minister Lee said mattered: international law, freedom of navigation and a united ASEAN.
Christopher Tremewan is a research fellow in political studies at the University of Auckland and author of "The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore."
