“From its founding, the city had to defend itself against attack, and balance carefully its relations with big neighbors like Java and Siam,” wrote the late John Miksic about 14th century Singapore’s foreign policy. More than half a millennium later, Lee Kuan Yew, S Rajaratnam, and Toh Chin Chye, key first generation (1G) leaders of the People’s Action Party (PAP), articulated something similar: “opportunistic non-alignment”. Non-aligned because Singapore would steer clear of cold war rivalries; opportunistic in that it would wring economic benefit from both sides whenever possible. And so, even as it became a workshop for American ships and the playground for American sailors during the Vietnam war, it also made commercial deals with merchant ships servicing the Soviet Pacific fleet.

Another half century on, there are imprints of this opportunistic non-alignment across the foreign policy of a new administration led by Lawrence Wong and his “4G” comrades. None clearer than Singapore’s contradictory approach towards the genocide in Gaza. Even as it publicly condemns Israeli aggression, sends aid to Palestinians, and funds the education here of bright Palestinians, it fetes and enables Israeli arms manufacturers and Zionists, and helps supply the weapon parts crucial to the devastation. 

But it’s not business as usual. Unlike his predecessors, Wong has to contend with a wholly new international environment: everything from the “rupture” in the global order, in the words of Canada’s Mark Carney at Davos last week, to an irrepressible desire by ordinary Singaporeans to have more of a say in this city-state’s foreign affairs—armed with new technology to pressure an hitherto aloof and impenetrable elite. What are the forces that might govern his actions?