When Singapore’s two political titans, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong began visiting the Middle East it wasn’t by any chance a coincidence.

Over a period in March both the ex-leaders began making frenetic trips to the Gulf and Maghreb, visiting Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Dubai and Morocco.

Singapore knows the winds of economic and political change blowing from the city-state do not just present it with an opportunity but a challenge.

Singapore is reputed globally for its innovation in sparking Free Trade Agreements (FTA). Is it any surprise that one of the world’s most competitive nations looks out constantly for virgin territories to plant its stakes?

A man-made economic oasis with no natural resources, the island-republic is perpetually at the mercy of the international trading community to draw in its keeps. It even relies on Malaysia’s daily water supplies to keep its people bathed and clean!

Indeed, if its vulnerability and landmass measuring only 26 miles from coast to coast are indicative of anything, it is that they present an interesting case study.

In his 2006 New Year address, the city-state’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong made no bones that without FTA agreements, the nation would have grown poorer to the tune of 14 percent in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) estimates.

The idea of FTA first arose, during a visit to former US President Bill Clinton by Goh Chok Tong. It was pursued because collapsing supranational trade agreements, susceptible to posturing by bureaucrats and vested interest groups, simply left hapless states like Singapore vulnerable to the winds of change.

And now Singapore looks toward the Middle East with great enthusiasm.

The economic transformation of Dubai may also have been part of the reasons for Singapore’s interest in the region.

A spitting Singaporean economic image, Dubai perhaps is the only known city in the world to have beaten Singapore’s record in accomplishing unprecedented growth in record time, according to Lee Kuan Yew.

If Dubai does hearten Arabs to see an Arab city achieve unseen levels of growth, the catalyst Singapore provides is for the rest of her brethren to emulate the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

On that score, it just would have given Singapore a clue to step into a breach that had long been the preserve of Westerners.

Singapore has good credentials in helping huge nations like China and India build some of their cities, as well as on advising them on special economic zones.

Singaporean expertise is greatly sought in the world in such areas as building of oil rig platforms. A Middle East flushing with black gold can clearly make provident use of this expertise.

But beyond economic imperatives, perhaps there are other factors, like fast depleting oil and gas supplies in some of Singapore’s traditional supply sources in Indonesia and Malaysia, prompting Singapore to align closely with the Middle East.

While Indonesia’s oil and gas supplies may slosh around for a little longer, Malaysia’s reportedly is slated to run out in ten years. So the Middle East is just the place to be whether to search for new business opportunities or to guard Singapore’s energy flank.

However, a little known but a nonetheless noticeable development to the Singapore administration over the last 5 years has been the steady but growing ties between the Maghreb, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Though Indonesia and Malaysia have the benefit of kindred religious ties, Singapore’s record of looking after the interests of its own Muslim population plus the masterly way it distinguished between waylaid fanatics and moderates following the dismantling of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist organization has won it favor in the eyes of the world.

“To beat terrorism, it is (important) we cultivate the moderate branch of Islam”, said Lee Kuan Yew in an interview that was published in the city-state’s mainstream broadsheet, The Straits Times.

Any studied inference from that statement means that the Singapore administration recognizes international terrorism to be a long-term problem requiring it to pull out all the stops to defeat it by soft power.

With continued cultivation, the natural outcome would be for both Singapore and moderate Islamic regimes to recapture the moral high ground now temporarily usurped by fundamentalists.

But importantly, what such a growing relationship really portends is for a migration of values, cultural habits, and lifestyles from either nation to the other, which puts it diametrically at odds with a Bush administration that opts for hard power by tanks and air assaults over Iraq.

If there is ever a historical precedent giving clues, it throwbacks to the times of the cultural exchange programs between the US and former Soviet Union.

Those exchange programs entailed the promotion of a sense of appreciation of the value systems of erstwhile foes, laying to rest conflicting notions of ideological superiority.

With both Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong schooled in the enlightened philosophy of multiculturalism, can it really be any surprise that they would ultimately think alike?

— Jaya Prakash lectures journalism at Beacon School of Technology (www.beacon.edu.sg) in Singapore.