We are not just another country. We are a very unlikely country,” Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said in 1987, with reference to the danger of politicizing religion in Singapore. In 1989, when Lee was asked in a Newsweek interview: “What have been your biggest frustrations?”, he replied:

The British had also badly wanted Malaysia to succeed. Post-war, the British had tried to broker a multiracial political fusion in Malaya, but had had to grant Malaya independence in 1957 without achieving it. Malaysia seemed to be a second chance for the British to try again. Lord Head, the British high commissioner in Malaysia, the relevant and anxious British Government offices, and Sir Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister, all urged the same course: that pressure be put on the Tunku “for a more inclusive national government”, one that would have leaders from Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak. But British and Commonwealth pressure could not prevail over the internal pressure the Tunku faced from Malay nationalism. The power of Malay nationalism: it was the same story as before, but this time, Lee Kuan Yew shared the melancholy of the British failure. For it prognosticated the expulsion of Singapore, which Lee said he would look back on each time as “a moment of anguish”.

However, looking on the bright side, he did not have to worry anymore about the Tunku or the ultra Malay nationalists. The threat of being displaced or detained no longer hung over him. He was free from all that now. He had, in fact, come out of Malaysia stronger than when he entered it. Merger, as he had correctly judged, was the perfect issue on which to defeat the communists.