4 ideas
Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 to secure a hinterland and a common market. Within two years it was expelled after clashing with Kuala Lumpur over Lee's 'Malaysian Malaysia' campaign for racial equality and after the 1964 race riots.
As a young man under the Japanese occupation of 1942–45, Lee watched the British, who had seemed permanent, collapse within weeks. He then saw the Japanese keep order through brutal and exemplary punishment. He concluded that people obey whoever holds real power, and that legitimacy rests on the ability to protect, not on inherited prestige. This shaped his later belief that a government must be feared enough to be effective.
The non-communist, English-educated founders of the PAP deliberately partnered with communist-led unions and Chinese-educated activists. Those groups had the mass base the founders lacked, and together they won against the colonial order. The alliance was treated as temporary. The moderates kept the party machinery, constitutional office and British and Malayan backing, so that when the inevitable split came in 1961 with the Barisan Sosialis breakaway, they could defeat their former partners.
A tiny state surrounded by larger, sometimes hostile neighbours cannot rely on goodwill, ideology or international sympathy. It survives only by being useful, disciplined and strong enough to raise the cost of being bullied. Lee argues that sentiment in foreign relations is a luxury small nations cannot afford, and that their policy must rest on a hard reading of others' interests.