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15 April 2015

Lee Kuan Yew and Henry Kissinger

April 13, 2015 

The world is filled with foreign policy challenges. How better to think about such problems than to seek council from the two most impressive strategists of the post World War II era.
As the debates rage along the Potomac regarding the Iran nuclear framework, ISIS, the Ukraine crisis, the rise of Chinese power and a half dozen other important U.S. foreign policy challenges, how better to think about these problems than to seek council from the two most impressive strategists of the post World War II era – the late Lee Kuan Yew and Henry Kissinger.

Lee and Kissinger were born a few months apart in 1923, Lee in Singapore and Kissinger in Furth, Germany. Both had deeply traumatic experiences in their teenage years. At 18, about to enter University, Lee watched Japan invade Malaya and conquer Singapore in less than two months, ending the myth of British Imperial invincibility and of white men’s genetic superiority over Asians.

He lived under brutal Japanese occupation for four years. The Japanese introduced the system of "Sook Ching,” "purge through purification" in Chinese, to get rid of those deemed to be anti-Japanese. The Sook Ching Massacre claimed the lives of between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya. These men were rounded up, taken to deserted locations around the island and systematically killed.

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