When Prime Minister Lawrence Wong calls the U.S.’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs a “seismic change in the global order,” he’s right about the impact—but conveniently sidesteps a more inconvenient truth: Singapore’s current vulnerability is not just a product of global chaos.
It is the result of years of policy decisions made without sufficient foresight or contingency planning by the very leaders now asking us to brace for impact.
For decades, the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) has aggressively liberalized Singapore’s trade and labour policies, aligning closely with the United States and multilateral institutions under the belief that free trade would ensure prosperity.
In the short term, it did. But that belief came with a price: dependence.
The PAP’s bet was that the global rules-based system would hold. That protectionism, nationalism, and unilateralism were relics of the past.
But the rise of Trump-era tariffs and today’s full-blown abandonment of World Trade Organisation (WTO) principles expose how naive that assumption was. We were told this was the only viable strategy—but where were the safeguards?
Now, as the U.S. rejects the very trade frameworks it built, Singapore finds itself overexposed and under-defended. And instead of accountability, we are offered rhetoric about “resilience,” “unity,” and “preparing for a dangerous world.” But who failed to prepare in the first place?
Singaporeans are being told to brace for more shocks, to be mentally prepared, to trust in our cohesion and reserves.
But reserves don’t fix policy misjudgments. And cohesion doesn’t erase the fact that we walked willingly into this trap. We tied our future to powers we had no influence over, and now we’re expected to simply weather the fallout with stoicism.
Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong echoed this sentiment, urging Singaporeans not to be “confused by strange ideas or soft solutions.”
But what exactly was the PAP’s solution?
Betting everything on globalization while ignoring the growing signs of geopolitical fracture?
Declaring that Singapore must always stay ahead, while laying no groundwork for what happens when the system we rely on collapses?
It is not a mark of leadership to be caught off guard by a crisis you helped create.
Yes, Singapore is a small, open economy. But smallness is not a justification for helplessness. We had leverage, we had foresight—and we squandered it by placing faith in a global order that is now imploding.
Singapore’s founding leaders, like Goh Keng Swee, understood the importance of leveraging multinational corporations (MNCs) not just for economic growth, but as platforms for capability-building.
The goal was never to remain dependent on foreign capital forever. It was to absorb their knowledge, develop our own technological base, and eventually create homegrown MNCs. That vision was bold, ambitious—and for a time, it worked.
But somewhere along the way, that ambition was replaced with complacency.
Today, we continue to play a subservient role to foreign MNCs, offering generous tax breaks and importing low-wage labor to keep costs low.
Instead of moving up the value chain, we’ve locked ourselves into a low-tax, low-wage model that prioritizes short-term investor appeal over long-term national resilience.
If the PAP wants to talk about planning, then it must begin with a reckoning. The first step is admitting that the era of rules-based globalization didn’t just end—it ended without us ever building a plan B.
And if there’s no plan B, then it’s time for new people at the helm to create one.
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