The View from Singapore

ON his swing through Asia next week, President Nixon will skip Singapore, domain of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. The omission is dictated by an understandably tight schedule, but it will deprive the President of some pertinent impressions. Lee, a Cambridge-educated pragmatist, has to a large degree succeeded in creating the sort of independent and self-assured nation that Nixon hopes will develop throughout the Far East. In the past decade, he has turned the island nation of 2,000,000 into Asia's second most affluent country. Though Singapore's population contains the Malay-Chinese mix that has proved to be explosive in neighboring Malaysia, Lee's city-state enjoys racial peace and political stability. Apart from that, Lee possesses one of the sharpest minds in Asia and some firm ideas on the role of the U.S. there after Viet Nam. That is his main topic in the following interview with TIME Correspondent David Greenway.

In the long run, will South Viet Nam. come under Communist control?

I would hope not. Politically, the South Vietnamese have got to create a government that commands the loyalty and support of the bulk of the population and galvanizes it into selfhelp. I hope that American troop withdrawals will be at such a rate as not to generate a sense of insecurity in the government of South Viet Nam. There must be sufficient time for the South Vietnamese to be trained to stand up and fight for themselves. If they can't, well. . . that's that.

If South Viet Nam does go Communist, will the danger for the rest of Southeast Asia be insurgencies, or will it come more from failure to solve social and economic problems?

Those are really two aspects of the same problem. If your country is moving to a higher level of prosperity and the better life, then no one is going to listen to the rabble-rousers. But if you get more and more hungry and angry people, then Communists will find it easier to recruit people as guerrillas. If South Viet Nam is lost, the chances are that whoever forms the Communist government will want to be the successor of French Indo-China, which included Laos and Cambodia. Whether they will be able to go on and create a insurrection in Thailand is quite another matter. I feel that if the Thais do not let their will melt away at the thought of being on their own--with American aid in arms and resources, but not in men --then Thailand will manage to stay nonCommunist. If Thailand sticks, then Malaysia has a better chance, and so Singapore will stick.

What are your views on regional defense in Asia?

When Americans talk about defense arrangements in Southeast Asia, they usually mean defense against China. But is China going on a predatory expansionist policy? That is not their method. Their technique is through people's liberation wars. Vietnamese, not Chinese, have to die in Viet Nam. The whole world has got to live with China. It is up to the major powers--America, Russia, Japan and the countries of Western Europe--to come to some accommodation first. Then the countries of Southeast Asia can find accommodation with China within the framework of the United Nations, I hope.

What do you feel the American role in Asia should be during the 1970s?

I would like to believe that you can discern your interests dispassionately so as not to have the pendulum swing away from Asia because of your rather tiresome experiences in Viet Nam. I accept the world as I find it. One thing I find is the disillusionment of the American people against the losses they have sustained. But what is not underlined so much is that you have prevented the Communists from taking over.

What is the state of the Asian Revolution, the nationalist, anticolonial struggle that followed World War II?

The Asian Revolution has no doubt got bogged down. None of these countries in Southeast Asia has completely established a new identity. The question now is how to fulfill expectations of people whom you have mobilized on the basis that, once the white man was gone, they would occupy all the big houses and the big desks. That requires getting your economy going.

And Singapore's role?

If Southeast Asia develops constructively, we could be useful as a convenient source of expertise and a channel through which these countries can get foreign exchange. But if it goes the other way, chaotic and nihilist, then I hope that we shall have enough wisdom and skill to isolate the forces of destruction. As the Dark Ages descended on Europe, places like Venice maintained relatively civilized standards of life. I would hope that such light from Singapore would eventually help to brighten up the area again.

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