Conversations With Ban Ki-Moon: What the United Nations Is Really Like? The View From the Top by Tom Plate

Author:Tom Plate [Plate, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814302043
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish Corp/Ccb
Published: 2012-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Guess Who’s

Coming to Dinner?

Survival.

Lee’s vision of geopolitical stability would require, for starters, an adult working relationship among great powers. Any thrust for hegemony by any one power is inherently disturbing and destabilizing. It is the moral as well as politically realistic position for all to oppose such a buildup by one power alone.

Even if Singapore were not the little bird pecking away on the top of the hippo to survive, but were itself one of the hippos, his vision and instinct would not change. Even in the mind of an alleged ‘soft authoritarian’, there have to be limits on the freedom of the strongest, as of course they burden the weakest.

Survival. LKY himself is quite the survivor. In an environment of utter comfort bereft of challenge, he would shrink psychologically to a more normal dimension of political actor. In the reality of his own mind, he sees existential challenges everywhere. He is still unconvinced that mainly Muslim Malaysia is no longer a military threat to 76 percent Chinese Singapore.

As he puts it to me: “Both our northern and southern neighbors are much larger than us. Both have Muslim majorities and are differently organized. Both have not completely accepted their ethnic Chinese citizens. This accentuates the religious and cultural divide, and a subconscious sense of being a nut in a nutcracker.”

Paranoid?

Or prudent?

Threats are everywhere. He has seen off engineers to Holland to study the science of dike building in the event the pace of global warming quickens and a rising sea level threatens Singapore’s reclaimed land. He most admires those who take destiny in their hands rather than cower in indecisiveness. He admires no one more than the Israelis for their hard-scrabble, high-IQ survivalism.

I look up from my yellow pad on which are scribbled topics I want at least to touch on before the clock runs out: “There’s a line in your autobiography that I just want to have a little fun with if you would. You talked about ‘every society has a small percentage that’s exceptionally able. These people are like the philosopher-kings of old. They will have to be thrown up through a meritocratic process or be actively sought out to lead. Doing so helps raise the lot of all society far more than pretending that all men are equally capable or talented.’ Then at one point, you said, and I found this hilarious: ‘I’m not as smart as an Israeli.’ ”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?”

He turned to stare at me, an eyebrow almost raised, as if the point were obvious: “The Israelis are very smart.”

“Why?”

He searches his memory for a story: “I asked a Bank of America president in 1990 or something, why are the Jews so smart? And he gave me a book, his own copy, well-thumbed. So—I had it bound up because it might come apart; I think I’ve still got it somewhere—I read it through, small book. And, well, it didn’t go into the pogroms and how the stupid people, the slow and the half-witted, were destroyed and the bright ones survived.

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