Asian countries have good ties with US, China and other major powers, don’t need Nato-equivalent, Singapore’s PM Lee says
- US President Biden said on Saturday that stronger ties among like-minded nations is needed amid ‘competition between democracies and autocracies’
- But Singapore’s PM Lee Hsien Loong said in an interview that a ‘better configuration’ is one that does not involve countries joining opposing blocs
Lee’s remarks in an interview with Nikkei Asia published on Monday come amid calls from US President Joe Biden for Washington’s partners in the region to shore up cooperation amid escalating rivalry against the world’s “autocracies”.
That rhetoric has largely been described by observers as aimed at getting countries aligned with the US and the West to cooperate and gird themselves against China and Russia.
Biden, currently on his maiden Asia tour as US president, said on Saturday that stronger ties among like-minded nations were necessary amid an inevitable “competition between democracies and autocracies”.
Asked by Nikkei’s editor Tetsuya Iguchi if Asia needed a “collective security equivalent” to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), Lee pointed out that Asia’s circumstances were not the same as Europe’s.
The region did not have Europe’s history, where Western countries were split from Soviet Union-backing “Warsaw Pact” nations during the Cold War.