The Hill News

When Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew brought his country from Third World to be the most prosperous country in the First World, he first had to deal with the West: “I had to come to terms with American power without a British buffer,” he has written. “The British enforced their will with a certain civility. The Americans were different, as I could see from the way they dealt with South Vietnamese leaders.”

Lee was likely referring to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, in 1963, but as the World Bank chief position opens up again today, it might be asked if, in Lee’s words describing that period, America still had “bulging muscles and a habit of flexing them.”

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