Lee Kuan Yew, a fighter for the world's better instincts
Henry Kissinger pays tribute to the late Lee Kuan Yew, whose leadership not only made a nation where there was none, but also acted as a kind of conscience to leaders around the globe
Lee Kuan Yew was a great man. And he was a close personal friend, a fact that I consider one of the great blessings of my life. A world needing to distil order from incipient chaos will miss his leadership.
Lee emerged onto the international stage as the founding father of the state of Singapore, then a city of about 1 million. He developed into a world statesman who acted as a kind of conscience to leaders around the globe.
Fate initially seemed not to have provided him a canvas on which to achieve more than modest local success. In the first phase of decolonisation, Singapore emerged as a part of Malaya. It was cut loose because of tensions between Singapore's largely Chinese population and the Malay majority and, above all, to teach the fractious city a lesson of dependency. Malaya undoubtedly expected that reality would cure Singapore of its independent spirit.
But great men become such through visions beyond material calculations. Lee defied conventional wisdom by opting for statehood. The choice reflected a deep faith in the virtues of his people. He asserted that a city located on a sandbar with nary an economic resource to draw upon, and whose major industry as a colonial naval base had disappeared, could nevertheless thrive and achieve international stature by building on its principal asset: the intelligence, industry and dedication of its people.
A great leader takes his or her society from where it is to where it has never been - indeed where it as yet cannot imagine being. By insisting on quality education, by suppressing corruption and by basing governance on merit, Lee and his colleagues raised the annual per capita income of their population from US$500 at the time of independence in 1965 to roughly US$55,000 today.
In a generation, Singapore became an international financial centre, the leading intellectual metropolis of Southeast Asia, the location of the region's major hospitals and a favoured site for conferences on international affairs. It did so by adhering to an extraordinary pragmatism: by opening careers to the best talents and encouraging them to adopt the best practices from all over the world.
Superior performance was one component of that achievement. Superior leadership was even more important. As the decades went by, it was moving - and inspirational - to see Lee, in material terms the mayor of a medium-size city, bestride the international scene as a mentor of global strategic order.