Transcription
I have had the privilege of meeting many world leaders over the past half century. I have sat with presidents, prime ministers, and dictators. But none taught me more than Lee Kuan Yew. We often called him the sage of Singapore or the grandmaster. But those titles, while respectful, feel too soft for the man I knew. A sage implies a man sitting quietly on a mountain dispensing gentle wisdom. Lee Kuan Yew was not gentle in his conclusions. He was a force of disciplined will. He was a man of unmatched intelligence and judgment who took a small spit of land with no natural resources and turned it into a first-world oasis.
But today, I want to talk to you about why he succeeded when so many others failed. I want to talk about the uncomfortable, often brutal truths that formed the bedrock of his worldview. Truths that we in the West have largely ignored, forgotten, or tried to wish away. We live in a world that loves to talk about universal rights, equality, and ideals. We build our foreign policy on how the world ought to be. Lee Kuan Yew never wasted a single second on how the world ought to be. He was obsessed, almost ruthlessly, with how the world is. And his starting point was not justice. It was not democracy. It was not even economics. His starting point was power.
When I asked him about his most fundamental strategic principles, he did not quote a philosopher or a political theorist. He gave me a look that cut right through the pleasantries and said, "Human beings, regrettable though it may be, are inherently vicious and have to be restrained from their viciousness." That is the brutal truth the West has ignored. We assume humanity has evolved past our base instincts. Lee Kuan Yew believed that while we may have conquered space, we have not conquered our own primeval nature. And if you build a society or a foreign policy that ignores those persistent human instincts, you invite failure.
In this session, we are going to strip away the diplomatic niceties. We are going to look at the world through the eyes of the ultimate realist. We are going to explore why he believed equality is a myth. Why he believed, in Machiavelli's terms, fear is more reliable than affection. And why, if we want to navigate the dangerous decades ahead, we must relearn the lessons of power.
To understand Lee Kuan Yew, you have to understand that he rejected a literal reading of the American Declaration of Independence. Now, he admired America. He admired our creativity, our can-do spirit, and our resilience. But he fundamentally rejected the premise that all men are created equal. To him, this was not just a harmless platitude. He believed it was a destabilizing assumption if treated as a statement of reality rather than aspiration. He told me once, "I started off believing all men and women are equal. I now know that is the most unlikely thing ever to have been."
His view was rooted in biology and evolution. He observed that millions of years of evolution have scattered humans across the globe, developing independently in different climates and conditions. He looked at the natural world and saw that no two things are ever equal, not even identical twins. One always comes out first. One always takes precedence. For Lee, this inequality was not a moral failing. It was a structural fact. He believed that in any group of 10,000 babies, a certain percentage are near geniuses, a certain percentage are average, and a certain percentage are slow. And he believed unapologetically that it is the near geniuses and the above-average who ultimately decide the shape of things to come.
This is a hard thing for the Western ear to hear. We are trained to believe that nurture conquers nature, that with the right education and the right environment, anyone can be anything. Lee Kuan Yew disagreed. He often spoke informally about a large imbalance between innate ability and acquired skills. He believed that much of a person's capability, temperament, and drive is innate and cannot be fundamentally transformed by education alone. You can train a person. Yes, you can polish them, but you cannot change their hardware. If you are limited in certain capacities, training can refine you, but it cannot remake you.
Why does this matter for geopolitics? Because Lee applied this same logic to leadership and governance. He did not believe you could teach someone to be a leader. You can teach management, but leadership requires an extra drive, intellectual verve, and tenacity that, in his view, cannot be reliably produced by training alone. This belief shaped his entire strategy for Singapore. He did not build a system based on the hope that everyone would be equal. He built a system that deliberately identified the most capable people and put them in charge. He called it "headhunting for ministers." He believed that a nation is only as good as the quality of its manpower and the quality of its leaders.
He criticized the West, specifically the European welfare states and arguably American idealism, for trying to equalize benefits. He argued that systems like Soviet communism failed precisely because they tried to fight this biological reality. If you treat everyone the same regardless of their contribution, the talented stop striving, and society stagnates. For Lee, the goal of governance was not to create a utopia of equality. It was to create a playing field where the most capable could rise, drive the economy, and pull the rest of society up with them. The more "yang" male competitiveness in society, he argued, the higher the total performance. This is the first brutal truth: unequal outcomes, he believed, are nature's default unless actively managed. Power belongs to those who recognize this, harness the talented, and do not apologize for excellence.
Now, you might ask, how does a man educated at Cambridge, a man steeped in British law, arrive at such a hardened view of humanity? He did not learn it in a classroom. He learned it in a war zone. Lee Kuan Yew's worldview was forged in the fires of World War II. He watched the British Empire, which was supposed to last for a thousand years, collapse in a matter of weeks when the Japanese army invaded Singapore in 1942. This was the single biggest political education of his life. Before the war, the British ruled by prestige. They ruled by the appearance of superiority. But when the Japanese arrived, Lee saw the naked reality of power. He saw how the British, who had been the immovable, complete masters, were suddenly pushed aside. And he saw how the Japanese ruled not with laws but with brutality. He told me, "I learned about power long before Mao Zedong wrote that power came from the barrel of the gun. The Japanese demonstrated this for three and a half years." He saw humanity stripped of its civilized veneer. He saw that when the structure of order collapses, people do not default to kindness; they default to survival. He saw people trapped in a power situation responding simply because they had to live.
This experience inoculated him against idealism. It taught him that order is fragile. We in the West often take order for granted. We assume that civil society is the natural state of things. Lee Kuan Yew knew that civil society is a thin crust over a volcano of chaos. He criticized leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev. When Gorbachev told the people of Moscow not to be afraid of the KGB, Lee was horrified. He thought, "He is sitting on top of a terror machine that holds the damn pile together, and he says, 'Do not be afraid.'" He believed Gorbachev had jumped into the deep end of the pool without learning how to swim.
Contrast that with his admiration for Deng Xiaoping. When the Tiananmen Square protests threatened the stability of China, Deng chose order over liberty. Lee Kuan Yew understood that choice. He said, "Without Deng, China would have imploded."
This brings us to the second brutal truth: order, he argued, precedes the effective operation of law. We often say "rule of law." Lee Kuan Yew inverted it. He preferred "order and law." He argued that without order, the operation of law is impossible. You cannot have human rights, you cannot have justice, and you cannot have democracy if you do not first have the stability that comes from a central authority willing to use power. He had to do nasty things in his career, locking people up without trial, to maintain that order. He accepted these decisions as tragic but necessary. He believed that if he had not been willing to use the iron in his soul, Singapore would have collapsed into anarchy. To the Western liberal mind, this sounds like an apology for authoritarianism. To Lee, it was simply the recognition that civilization is artificial. It has to be built, and it has to be defended, sometimes with harsh methods.
This brings us to his philosophy of leadership. If humans are inherently vicious and if order is fragile, how must a leader behave? Lee Kuan Yew was a student of Machiavelli, and he was explicit about it. Between being loved and feared, he told me, "I've always believed Machiavelli was right." If leadership carries no consequences, authority becomes meaningless. This is a stunning admission for a modern political leader. Most politicians today are obsessed with being liked. They follow opinion polls. They hire consultants to soften their image. Lee Kuan Yew considered a leader who follows polls to be weak. He said, "If you are concerned with whether your rating will go up or down, then you are not a leader; you are just catching the wind."
He believed that the job of a leader is not to reflect the current whims of the people but to define their future. "My job as a leader," he said, "is to make sure that before the next elections, enough has developed to swing them around." He was not interested in being popular while he was governing. He was interested in being right at the end of the term. This is the essence of his pragmatism. He did not care about the theory of government. He cared about the results. When I asked him about his strategic approach, he said, "I do not work on a theory. Instead, I ask, 'What will make this work?'" He was not guided by Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates. He was guided by the acid test of reality.
This put him at odds with the political correctness of the West. He felt that Western leaders were often paralyzed by their own ideologies. They would refuse to take necessary actions because they violated some abstract principle of human rights or democratic process. Lee Kuan Yew did not have that paralysis. He looked at a problem, whether it was drug trafficking, ethnic tension, or economic stagnation, and he applied whatever solution offered the highest probability of success. If that meant banning chewing gum to keep the subway doors working, he banned chewing gum. If it meant imposing strict racial quotas in housing to force integration, he imposed quotas. He called this being "correct," not "politically correct."
And this leads to the third brutal truth: respect is more durable than popularity. In the geopolitical arena, this meant that Lee Kuan Yew never confused diplomacy with friendship. He knew that nations do not have friends; they have interests. He saw international relations as a jungle where big fish eat small fish, and small fish eat shrimps. He warned that if you are a small state, or even a great power, and you rely on the goodwill of others, you are doomed. You must make yourself relevant, you must make yourself useful, or preferably, you must make yourself formidable. Singapore survived not because it was loved, but because it made itself indispensable and because it developed a "poison shrimp" defense strategy. "Even if you swallow us, we will kill you." That is the language of power.
So, what does all of this mean for us today? Why does the West need to hear this brutal truth now? Because we are entering an era where the comfortable illusions of the post-Cold War world are evaporating. For 30 years, we believed that history had ended, that democracy, free markets, and Western values were the inevitable destination for all mankind. Lee Kuan Yew told us decades ago that we were wrong. He warned us that we cannot impose our standards on other societies. He said, "I do not believe you can impose on other countries standards which are alien and totally disconnected with their past." He looked at China and told us not to expect them to become a liberal democracy. If they did, they would collapse. He warned us that no single power, no single religion, no single ideology can conquer the world or remake it in its own image. The world is too diverse. The cultures are too deep.
The West's greatest mistake, in Lee's eyes, is our hubris. We believe our system is the final answer. We believe that if we just lecture other nations on human rights, they will see the light. Lee Kuan Yew saw this as arrogance. He saw it as a refusal to accept the reality of cultural difference. He believed that the future belongs to those who can maintain social discipline. He looked at the West and saw a society that was losing its cohesion. He saw guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, and the breakdown of civil society. He saw a culture that emphasized the rights of the individual over the safety of the community. He warned, "If you do this with the whole mass, you will have a mess."
His final brutal truth is this: power is not a static inheritance. It is a constant struggle. The United States has been the dominant power for so long that we have forgotten what it takes to build power from scratch. We have forgotten the discipline, the hunger, and the iron in the soul that is required to rise. Lee Kuan Yew never forgot. He knew that civilizations rise and fall based on their vitality, their cohesion, and their stamina. He knew that if a people lose their drive, if they become complacent and expect wealth without work, they will decline.
As we look at the rise of China, a topic we will discuss in depth in future sessions, we must look at it through Lee Kuan Yew's realist lens. We are not facing a misunderstood partner. We are not facing a nation that wants to join our club. We are facing a civilization that remembers its past glory and is driven by a reawakened sense of destiny. They are playing the game of power. Are we?
Lee Kuan Yew left us a compass. He told us to stop looking at the world as we wish it to be and start dealing with it as it is. He told us that order matters more than liberty, that talent matters more than enforced equality, and that in the end, he believed morality matters, but power determines outcomes. It is shaped by those who understand the mechanics of power and have the will to use it. The question for the West is not whether Lee Kuan Yew was right. The question is whether we are brave enough to accept his brutal truths before it is too late.