Opinion | Looming Korean nuclear crisis shows world’s need for deep thinking like George Yeo’s

North Korea’s nuclear development and South Korea’s interest in its own nuclear weapons programme bode ill for hopes of denuclearising the peninsula

Bringing China and the US together to make the world safer requires sharp observations like those of Singapore’s former foreign minister

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A news programme on a TV screen at Seoul Railway Station shows images of a North Korean missile launch on February 20. North Korea’s continued nuclear development and growing South Korean interest in starting a nuclear weapons programme have further dimmed hopes of denuclearising the Korean peninsula. Photo: AP

Published: 3:30am, 8 Mar 2023

Geopolitical commentary can be invaluable, but not all analyses return good payback for your time and attention. Commentary that is done quick on the draw can lack perspective and twist in the wind; even those drawn from deeper wells can take too long to surface. Then there is a brand that says it knows what it thinks without knowing much at all.

Rare is the public intellectual who is able to be quick, deep and sharp, but that is George Yeo, who was Singapore’s foreign minister from 2004 to 2011. Musings, his second volume of policy thoughts and personal recollections, now graces bookstores in Asia and across the world. Among his many banquet memories are geopolitical commentaries of high calibre.

Intellectually, Yeo hails from an exceptional generation of Singapore practitioner-thinkers. Under the mantle of successive prime ministers starting from Lee Kuan Yew, the country also raised to prominence Chan Heng Chee, Tommy Koh and Kishore Mahbubani, among others.

These diplomats are respected across a global range of geopolitics and ideologies. Western journalists with the desire to want to know what Asians think would learn more from this quartet than from the usual sources.

Yeo, educated at Cambridge and Harvard, stitches his wide-ranging musings into a rich tapestry of conversational observations about people, places and policies which gives lie to the stereotype of little Singapore as some state asylum of mental provincials. His writings reflect almost everything under the sun with which his Singapore was involved during his career, which, as it turns out, was just about everything out there worth reflection.

This included unpublicised forays to North Korea. Singaporean foreign policy is highly internationalist, the country having managed to get on well by riding economic globalisation as far out as possible on the yield curve of pragmatism.

Opinion | Looming Korean nuclear crisis shows world’s need for deep thinking like George Yeo’s

North Korea’s nuclear development and South Korea’s interest in its own nuclear weapons programme bode ill for hopes of denuclearising the peninsula Bringing China and the US together to make the world safer requires sharp observations like those of Singapore’s former foreign minister

North Korea’s nuclear development and South Korea’s interest in its own nuclear weapons programme bode ill for hopes of denuclearising the peninsula

Bringing China and the US together to make the world safer requires sharp observations like those of Singapore’s former foreign minister