Singapore’s national security policies are outdated and in dire need of revision. These policies are heavily influenced by the paranoia of the 1960s, when a vulnerability fetish gave rise to a siege mentality amongst Singaporean leaders that persists till today.
One archaic assumption is that Singapore should maintain a military alliance with Israel to protect itself from its main security threat—potentially hostile Muslim neighbours. This harks back to the mid 1960s, when Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, looked across the world and realised there was one other state that had faced and repeatedly overcome a similar national security challenge—being “a tiny minority in an archipelago of 30,000 islands inhabited by more than 100 million Malay or Indonesian Muslims.” Full story
