MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

During the past six years foreign policy was concerned primarily with aiding Singapore's economic and industrial development. The stress was on developing economic relations with foreign countries. The aim of foreign policy was to assist Singapore to maintain internal political stability and economic rationality so as to provide incentives for local and foreign investment.

Singapore has also avoided adopting arresting but futile postures towards cold war issues.

In the years ahead Singapore's foreign policy will have to be more outward looking than it has hitherto been if only because external developments will be more directly felt by Singapore. The British military run down, the accelerated American dis-engagement of ground forces from Vietnam and other parts of South-east Asia, the growing interest in our region of a great power like the People's Republic of China, a developing Russian presence in the area and the re-emergence of Japan as a major power suggest potentialities for new kinds of competition and conflict in the region. Where before the Pacific Ocean was the main arena of big power conflict, it has now been broadened to include the Indian Ocean.

Since Singapore serves as the gateway to both these oceans its strategic value, in peace and in war, has been enhanced and not lessened by British withdrawal. So more than ever before Singapore's domestic policies will be shaped not only by internal needs and aspirations but also by the fact of competition and conflict not among a larger number of outside powers but also superpowers.

Some of these external developments will impose heavy strains and great dangers. They may put unpleasant but necessary curbs on what we can and would like to do domestically. Some of the old and comforting assumptions of our foreign policy may have to be modified and even discarded in the light of new circumstances we may find ourselves in.

The big powers themselves are reassessing, in radical ways, policies and attitudes to one another. We cannot foresee what new permutations of big powers would be worked out. Whatever the nature of the new combinations and permutations, their undeviating objective would be the furtherance of big power interests under conditions of competition and conflict.

And Singapore, from the point of view of the big powers, would be no more than a valuable piece on the chessboard. Singapore cannot halt the game the big powers will play in the region. However, we can meet and overcome the problems outside nations can create for us by basing our foreign policy on realities and not on wishful thinking.

A prerequisite for our survival as a distinct people is national cohesiveness. So any attempt to weaken this solidarity by appeals to contrary chauvinistic pulls must be fought unflinchingly.

The present prosperity and stability in Singapore can generate complacency and wishful thinking that all is well and that if we mind our own business other nations will leave us alone.

Unfortunately the region in which we live is too valuable to many nations for them to leave us alone. We will be affected more and more and often in vital ways by what happens outside our shores.