On a visit to Harvard in 1968, the 45-year-old Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, stunned the faculty with a stirring defense of American foreign policy in Asia, including the war in Vietnam, as critical to the security of small states such as his. This speech symbolized not only his penchant for “going against the grain” (281), but also a keen awareness of where the interests of his state truly lay, apart from abstract moral categories. Lee was the leader of a new, tiny state with a divided population and almost entirely lacking in natural resources, and yet it soon became an economic giant. Kissinger argues that Lee convinced his people “to unlock possibilities in themselves that they had not known existed” (283), using his own cosmopolitan background as an example.

Born in 1923, when Singapore was a British colony governed from India, Lee grew up in a Chinese family but attended English-language schooling. In 1941, while Lee was still a young man, Singapore fell to Japan, and there followed an occupation that tried to snuff out Chinese and English influence alike. Lee kept himself useful by translating Japanese propaganda into English. Seeking further education in Cambridge after the war, anti-colonial struggles in India and elsewhere inspired Lee, who in 1950 returned home to a country racked with economic troubles.