As Asian countries nervously eye a voracious China and an unpredictable North Korea, the Pentagon’s leaders tell them, America has their back. But do they speak for the President?
Singapore – The Istana presidential palace sits on a lush green hill surrounded by the towering skyscrapers of this wealthy city-state, its gleaming white columns and porticos recalling the colonial-era British Raj that built it on a former nutmeg plantation in 1867. Begun as a trading post of the British East India Company and occupied by the Japanese during World War II, Singapore today boasts one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the world and is a hub of global finance and commerce. Just off shore in the Strait of Malacca a mighty armada of cargo ships stretches to the horizon, a visible sign of the trade that has made modern Asia the most powerful economic engine in history.
On a recent morning General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was greeted at Istana by a full military honor guard and band. Singapore’s president, prime minister and military leaders ushered Dunford into a ceremony where the general was given the country’s Distinguished Service Order, a metal as big as a fist that hung from a wide ribbon draped over his shoulders. As a combat leader and no-nonsense Marine, “Fighting Joe” Dunford does not revel in pomp or personal aggrandizement. Yet he fully understood that the award was bestowed not so much to him personally, but rather for what he represents.
Like the other Asian Tigers, tiny Singapore has thrived in the rules-based international order that the United States constructed out of the wreckage of World War II.
