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it wears off faster among the young and energetic than among the older, more world-weary but also more patient

Middle-class Singaporean families often refer to themselves nowadays as the “sandwich generation,” by which they mean that between needing to care for elderly parents and spending heavily on tuition or tutoring and uniforms for school-age children, they have little left to spend on themselves

There are more than 10,000 cases, and numbers are rising fast. More than 800 cases were registered in just five and a half days this past week, more than the previous all-time record for a full week.

The Singaporean system lacks an open-ended entitlement akin to the U.S. Social Security system. It uses a market-based system with much to commend it, but it isn’t perfect. The system is designed to rely in part on multigenerational families taking care of the elderly, so as is the case everywhere, when a family doesn’t cohere well for one reason or another, its elderly members often suffer most.

with the coming of Singapore’s second monsoon season, the island is suffering the worst bout of dengue fever infections in more than a decade.

No country in the world has benefited more than Singapore from U.S. postwar grand strategy, except perhaps China. Which is an interesting observation, often made here, in its own right.

He proceeded to explain that the U.S. effort in Vietnam had already bought the new nations of Southeast Asia shelter from communist onslaught for three to four precious years.

LKY’s son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, repeated the same conclusion in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. He added that ever since the Vietnam War era, regardless of the end of the Cold War and dramatic changes in China, the U.S. role in East Asia has been both benign—he did not say error-free—and stabilizing.

More than that, U.S. support for an expanding free-trade accented global economic order has enabled Singapore to surf the crest of burgeoning economic growth in Asia, becoming the most successful transshipment platform in history. It has enabled Singapore to benefit from several major technological developments—containerization is a good example—that have revolutionized international trade in manufactures

Few realize that military power can do more than either compel or deter. Most of the time most military power in the hands of a status quo actor like the United States neither compels nor deters; it “merely” reassures, except that over time there is nothing mere about it

The most important of these reasons—and, I’ve learned, the hardest one for foreigners to understand—is that the Protestant/Enlightenment DNA baked indelibly into the American personality requires a belief in the nation’s exceptionalist virtue to justify an activist role abroad

Singapore has ridden the great whale of Asian advancement in a sea of American-guaranteed tranquility.

Singapore’s approach to dealing with China has been one of strategic hedging. There is no getting around the need to cooperate economically and functionally with China, for Chinese influence permeates the entire region. Do a simple thought experiment: Even if Singaporeans determined to avoid China, how could they avoid the emanations of Chinese relations with and influence on Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and Korea? Impossible.

Singapore’s close relationship with the United States needs to be seen as similarly enmeshed with the greater web of U.S. relationships in littoral Asia, as well as with India and the Middle East. It is misleading, therefore, to define the issue as one of Singapore’s confidence, or lack thereof, that the United States will come to Singapore’s aid and defense en extremis.

The utility of the U.S. role vis-à-vis China is mainly one of regional balancing that indirectly benefits Singaporean security.

Singapore’s hedging strategy, which reflects a similar disposition throughout Southeast Asia with variations here and there, only works within certain ranges of enabling reality. It doesn’t work if American power or will wanes too much, and it doesn’t work if the broader Sino-American regional balance collapses into glaring enmity and major-power conflict.

Over the past dozen years the worry has been too much American waning, less of capability than of strategic attention, competence, and will. Now, over the past year or two, the worry has shifted to anxiety over potential system collapse into conflict and even outright war.

It’s no fun being a sentient ping pong ball between two behemoths with stinging paddles, so they join together in ASEAN hoping that this will deflect such incentives. It won’t, but people do what they can when they cannot do what they like.

the flat-out truth: The United States is in the process of doing something no other great power in modern history has ever done. It is knowingly and voluntarily abdicating its global role and responsibilities

It is troubled within, so is internally directed for reasons good and otherwise. Thus distracted from the rest of the world in a Hamlet-like act sure to last at least a decade, it is unlikely ever to return in full to the disinterested, active, and constructive role it pioneered for itself after World War II.

The recessional began already at the end of the George W. Bush Administration, set roots during the eight years of the Obama presidency, and became a bitter, relentless, tactless, and barely shy of mad obsession during the Trump presidency.

the strategy itself is unlikely to be revivified for several reasons.

One Lee Kuan Yew vignette sums up the matter. In the autumn of 1968, at a dinner in his honor at Harvard, the Prime Minister had to sit through a litany of complaints from leading scholars about President Johnson’s disastrously escalatory war policies in Vietnam. When they were through, no doubt expecting sympathy from an Asian leader, LKY, never one to bite his tongue, turned on his hosts and announced: “You make me sick.”

When, for justifiable reasons or not, the nation loses its moral self-respect, it cannot lift its chin to look confidently upon the world, or bring itself to ask the world to look upon America as a worthy model, let alone a leader.

That fact that most Americans today also increasingly see expansive international engagement as too expensive, too dangerous, too complex to understand, and unhelpful either to the “main street” American economy or to rock-bottom American security, is relevant too

the disappearance of a single “evil” adversary in Soviet communism, the advent of near-permanent economic anxiety punctuated by the 2008-9 Great Recession—whatever numbers the stock market puts up—and the sclerotic polarization of American politics have left most Americans with little bandwidth for foreign policy narratives.

Few listen to any member of our tenured political class with the gumption to argue that U.S. internationalism remains in the national interest. In any event, few try, and even fewer manage to make any sense when they do.

In that context, pleas from thoughtful observers that we must find a mean between trying to do too much and doing too little are likely to be wasted. No thoughtful, moderate approach to any public policy question can get an actionable hearing these days.

what has happened to “the America I knew and so admired” that its people could elect a man like Donald Trump President? How could a great country deteriorate so quickly from apparent competence, lucidity of mind, and cautious self-confidence into utterly debilitating spasms of apparent self-destruction?

The political culture as a whole has become a centrism incinerator, an immoderation generator, a shuddering dynamo of shallow intellectual impetuosity of every description.

in the wake of the George Floyd unrest one side thinks a slogan—“law and order”—that is mighty close to a dogwhistle for “shoot people of color” can make it all better, while the other side advocates defunding or abolishing the police, for all the good that would do struggling inner-city underclass neighborhoods.

To any normal person these are brazenly unserious propositions, yet they suck up nearly all the oxygen the U.S. media has the inclination to report about. The optic once it reaches Singapore, 9,650 miles away, is one of raving derangement.

Drop any policy proposal into any of the great lava flows of contemporary American irrationality and any sane center it may possess will boil away into nothingness in a matter of seconds

It’s hard for many to let go of hoary assurances about American benignity, constancy, and sound judgment

It is a little like trying to peel a beloved but thoroughly battered toy out of the hands of a four-year old. They want to hold onto it, even though at some level they know it’s time to loosen their grip.

Since then the mendacious narcissism of Donald Trump, the eager acquiescence to it of nearly the entire Republican Party, and its deadly metathesis in the COVID-19 and George Floyd contexts, have changed their questions. They no longer ask how this man could have become President. Now they ask where is the bottom of this sputtering cacophonous mess? They ask what will happen before and then on and after November 3

Singapore’s good fortune in recent decades is by no means entirely an accident of its ambient geostrategic surroundings, but it owes much to those surroundings. While Singaporeans were honing the arts of good government, saving and investing in the country, educating and inventing value-added jobs for themselves, all the while keeping intercommunal relations inclined toward greater tolerance and harmony, the world was cooperating mightily with their ambitions. At the business end of that world was the United States

The U.S. grand strategy of providing security goods to the global commons sheltered Singapore’s efforts in more ways than one over the years

In 1965, when Singapore was thrust into independence from the Malaysian union, a more fraught environment could barely have been imagined. Indonesia was going crazy in the year of living dangerously, and the konfrontasi spilled over violently onto Singapore’s streets, layering on the raw feelings of race riots here in 1964. Communist Chinese infiltration of every trade union movement in the region was a fact of life, not to exclude shards of Singapore’s, and the Cultural Revolution was at full froth in China. So when U.S. Marines hit the beach at Da Nang in February 1965 the independence-generation leadership here counted it as a blessing.

this is exactly the problem now: Those massively benign trends are at risk of inanition, if not reversal.

While China is no longer either Marxist or crazy, as it was during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it is still Leninist, as its recent summary arrogation of Hong Kong’s negotiated special status shows. It has meanwhile grown mighty economically, advanced technologically at surprising speed, and has taken to investing grandly in its military capabilities. Its diplomacy has become more assertive, some would even say arrogant, as its Wolf Warrior nationalism has grown

The downward economic inflection of the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing economic strains