LKY’s diplomacy ‘not about being nice’

Former Permanent Secretary (Foreign Affairs) Bilahari Kausikan yesterday shared a “less well known” anecdote to show Mr Lee’s approach to diplomacy — that it is “not about being nice, polite or agreeable” and was more fundamentally about protecting and promoting the country’s interests, “preferably by being nice but if necessary by other appropriate means”.

In 1981, at the International Conference on Kampuchea held at the United Nations, the US was “poised to sell out Singapore’s and ASEAN’s interests in favour of China’s interest to see a return of the Khmer Rouge regime,” Mr Kausikan recounted.

“The then-Assistant Secretary of State in charge of China policy even threatened our Foreign Minister that there would be ‘blood on the floor’ if we did not relent. We held firm,” he said. “The next year, Mr Lee travelled to Washington DC and, in a meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described America’s China policy as ‘amateurish’.”

Mr Kausikan, who took notes for the meeting, said he was “bemused by the spectacle of the Assistant Secretary frantically scrambling to find out what exactly Mr Lee had said”.

“I don’t know if it was coincidental, but the very next year the Assistant Secretary in question was appointed Ambassador to Indonesia; an important position, but one in which he no longer held sway over China policy,” he said. “And when his new appointment was announced, the gentleman anxiously enquired through an intermediary if Mr Lee had told then-President Soeharto anything about him. He was reassured and served honourably in Indonesia.”