Singapore has long been one of the United States’ most reliable and trustworthy partners. Despite being one of the world’s smallest countries by land area, it is one of the world’s most respected nations, as a world-class economic hub whose public policies are studied extensively by others.
With a bilateral free trade agreement, enhanced defense cooperation agreement, and digital economy partnership in place, the U.S. and Singapore enjoy close cooperation across a multitude of sectors. At the same time, their relationship has also been rooted in candor. Both countries have not shied away from commenting on – and sometimes even criticizing – each other’s political systems, laws, and social mechanisms.
The current Trump administration, however, has introduced a degree of volatility into bilateral ties. Last month, the administration moved to end Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, a decision that shocked the nearly 7,000 foreigners enrolled at the institution, including 151 enrolled Singaporean students and scholars.
The announcement additionally rattled the roughly 4,500 Singaporean students studying in the United States, harboring a fear that this decision would initiate a domino effect that would ripple through their institutions.
Singapore was also surprisingly hit by President Donald Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs announcement, which introduced a 10 percent baseline tariff on all imports to the United States.
Top Singaporean officials immediately criticized the United States’ economic actions. In what has now become a speech heard around the world, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong recently addressed Parliament and likened the tariff announcements to a repudiation of the very global trade system that the U.S. helped establish and championed.
Liberation Day also reinforced concerns that Singapore was being punished by the Trump administration for carefully balancing its pendulum between the U.S. and China, a policy that has long been one of its core tenets since independence and a critical one given its status as a small island city-state.
More closely examining what Singapore truly means to the U.S. will easily prove why Singapore should not be penalized for maintaining its Sino-American balancing act. America must realize that Singapore has consistently been one of its genuine friends in the Indo-Pacific – and world – for the last several decades.
In fact, Singaporean diplomats and public servants are renowned for their straight-talking abilities and clear-eyed perspectives on several issues, including China-U.S. relations. This has not gone unnoticed by U.S. government officials. It should come as no coincidence, then, that some of the more recent U.S. secretaries of state have met with their Chinese counterparts shortly after consulting with their Singaporean partners.
For example, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a call with Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan on February 10, 2021. The very next month, he led a high-level delegation to Alaska to meet with senior-most Chinese officials in a session that gained notoriety for how tense both sides appeared to be.
On June 16, 2023, Blinken welcomed Balakrishnan to the State Department. Just two days later, he traveled to China for an extensive series of engagements, including a bilateral with President Xi Jinping.
These touchpoints are also applicable to Mike Pompeo’s tenure as the secretary of state during Trump’s first term. Pompeo’s meeting with Balakrishnan in D.C., visit to Singapore in June 2018 – primarily for the initial summit between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un – and trip to Beijing came within a two-week span, one after the other.
One year later, on May 16, 2019, Pompeo met with Balakrishnan at the State Department. He then spoke to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi via phone on May 18.
Rewinding to Secretary John Kerry’s time in office reveals a very similar story. On March 13, 2013, Kerry met with then-Singaporean Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam at the State Department. He spoke to Wang Yi over the phone exactly one week later.
On May 13, 2014, Kerry held a phone conversation with Wang, just one day after he once again hosted Shanmugam in Washington.
While the above trend is not universally applicable to every high-stakes meeting between the U.S. and China, it has nonetheless become – and perhaps should remain – formulaic to some extent: meet with the Singaporeans before meeting with the Chinese, as no one else may understand both superpowers as well as the Singaporeans do.
Simply put, Singapore’s unique ability to navigate both Washington and Beijing makes it an indispensable sounding board for U.S. foreign policy in Asia.
Notwithstanding regional and global headwinds, Wong and his newly-formed Cabinet will look to continue strengthening ties with the U.S., China, and other countries to ensure that Singapore’s foreign policy remains multifaceted and multipronged.
Singapore has constantly placed a premium on its relationship with the United States and will continue to do so going forward. Washington would do well to remember this and avoid implementing policies that enforce punitive measures on Singapore for sticking to its long-standing approach to diplomacy.