Introduction

In studying Lee's strategic thought, it is imperative to ask: what do I mean by ‘strategic thought’? The term ‘strategy’ means different things to different scholars. In the words of a strategic studies scholar, Bernard Loo, “at the end of the day, however, it seems to me that these notions of strategy really focus on the traditional definitions of security – the absence of external threats to states, in terms of both sovereignty as well as territorial integrity. In that regard, conceptions of geopolitics and how it translates into foreign policy exist quite comfortably within the rubric of security; and strategy (however defined) can be thought of as the logic that underpins the ways in which the use of instruments of power and force (both military as well as non-military) helps to ensure this ‘security’.” This article is therefore about Lee Kuan Yew's philosophy on foreign policy, his thinking on geopolitics as well as war and peace, all the while bearing in mind Raymond Aron's dictum that strategic thought “draws its inspiration each century, or rather at each moment in history, from the problems which events pose” (Buchan 1970).

Lee's strategic thought was essentially shaped by Singapore's unique situation as a small island state without a hinterland located in a strategic yet vulnerable region. It was formed against the backdrop of the worsening Cold War between the anti-communist West and the expanding communist bloc, which stretched across the Eurasian mainland to China, with the nations of the nascent non-aligned movement caught somewhere in between. As Lee reminded his audience in his S. Rajaratnam Lecture in 2009, “small countries have little power to alter the region, let alone the world.”