201. Letter From Singaporean Prime Minister Lee to President Carter 1
Although I had prepared myself, my meeting with you3 was an experience quite out of the ordinary.
[Page 690]You had a hectic week, meeting many leaders from all over the world. Many, including those from the Middle East, had urgent and pressing problems. Then there were domestic issues like your energy legislation demanding attention.
I was astonished by your total and absolute concentration on the subjects we discussed. Your command of the facts on Singapore and on the ASEAN region left me thinking of a chess grandmaster playing against a dozen opponents simultaneously. The metaphor is imprecise. Quite a few of those you met, like me, were on your side.
ASEAN wants what the rest of the world wants—peace and stability, to work for economic and social progress. The best hope Southeast Asians have of achieving our human potential is through economic cooperation with the developed world. The benefits of adequate nutrition, clothing, medical care and education have long eluded a vast majority of our peoples.
Five countries have banded together in ASEAN to increase cooperation between ourselves, and to enhance economic complementarity between us and the industrial countries. The driving force for cooperative endeavour must be indigenous. The inputs of capital, technology, and know-how must come from outside, from America, Japan, Western Europe and Australasia. These inputs plus access to the great markets of the industrial countries can enable ASEAN to become productive, more quickly.
ASEAN governments, and our peoples, know from the experience of Indonesia, India and Egypt in the 1950’s and 60’s, that economic aid from and collaboration with, the Soviet Union cannot bring significant gains. Nor has the experience of Albania, Indonesia and several developing countries in Africa, shown China to be the power house or the model for modernisation.
I respected the frankness you placed on human needs, emphasising the needs of the most distressed, under which Singapore does not qualify. The world is not fair. But that America’s President is seen to be making it more fair, is to win half the battle for hearts and minds in the great North-South debate. America can give a fresh lead to this search for a more just and equal world.
Prospects for developing countries are clouded by high unemployment and inflation in the West. There have been ever more menacing noises of protectionism from political and labour leaders in America and Western Europe. Exporting to Japan has always been difficult. Now the EEC is threatening quotas and restrictions unless we agree to restricting volumes on textiles and garments, and to exercise “voluntary” restraint on a whole range of electrical and electronic goods.
Worse, investments from the industrial nations are seen by labour leaders in America and Western Europe to be the exporting of jobs. [Page 691] There are pressures for changes in tax laws to reduce the transfer of capital, technology and skills to the developing countries, and cut down competition. If these pressures succeed, international economic cooperation will take several steps backwards.
Developing countries must convince leaders and people of industrial countries that mankind’s future depends on governments in the industrial countries resisting pressures for a retreat, however disguised or modified, into protectionism. Any retreat is to diminish hopes of building a more rational and productive world economic system.
It needs faith and courage to keep the world moving forward. The easy way is to respond to the national interests, reflexes developed through past crises. But they were crises in a world less integrated, less interlocked, and less interdependent, and through which civilisation survived by the skin of its teeth.
I believe that you, Mr President, have the strength and the courage to give the West, and the developing countries linked to the West, the will to make the present world economic order work, to improve upon it, so that rich and poor countries alike can do better out of international trade and cooperation. The world needs an international economic order which will enable governments and their constituents the opportunities to work and pay for the better life all peoples want. Mankind will do better in cooperation and competition. We can do with less of the antagonisms and animosities which have so clouded the minds of many in the North-South divide.
Warmest good wishes.4
Yours Sincerely,
- Source: Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Far East, Armacost Chron File, Box 5, 11/1–10/77. No classification marking.↩
- Lee wrote the salutation by hand.↩
- See Document 200.↩
- Lee wrote “Warmest good wishes. Yours Sincerely,” by hand.↩