FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Foreign Affairs is an extension of the domestic policies of the Government into the field of international politics. Our policies must be designed first to secure the physical survival of Singapore, its territorial integrity, and second its economic growth. We seek to be friends with all, to establish cordial and fruitful relationships particularly in the field of trade and industrial development. But the prerequisite of friendship is that there should be non-interference in the internal affairs of each other. Not unnaturally, the governments we feel closest to are those with similar background experiences of colonial subjugation and similar political aspirations and policies to create a more equal and just society. Hence our affinity to many Governments in Afro-Asia, whose leaders have, after successfully striving for independence against colonialism, now seek to establish a new social order, more just, more prosperous than the one they inherited.

But the past should never be allowed to distort and deform our judgment of the wider and the long term future. No memory however bitter of British exploitation in the past should blur our assessment of the capacity of Britain, and other white members of the Commonwealth like Australia and New Zealand who are now the minority in a predominantly Afro-Asian grouping to make a contribution to our security and to assist us in our economic development. That their policies were designed to keep us down in the past makes no difference to the fact that today they have neither the will nor indeed the capacity to deter us from pursuing our independent goals. Indeed I believe they realise that it is in their own basic national interest that we should continue to survive and even to thrive and prosper.