SINGAPORE: After 24 years in politics and 14 years as Singapore’s defence minister, Dr Ng Eng Hen announced last month that he will be stepping down.

In a one-and-a-half-hour-long interview with local media at the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) headquarters on Tuesday (May 13), he shared his thoughts and advice on how Singapore should navigate an increasingly turbulent geopolitical environment.

The 66-year-old, who is the nation's longest-serving defence minister, also had some advice for Singapore's next generation of leaders.

Q. During your tenure, Singapore deepened defence ties with major powers and regional partners. What were some of the toughest balancing acts you had to do behind the scenes?

Personally, I've never subscribed to the idea that you could balance big powers - between China and US, for example - specifically. I think that's a bit of a, to me, hubris and not realistic. You don't have that kind of agency. Big powers, it's in their interest to do things. They will do it even with regard to larger countries, let alone a small country like Singapore.

From time to time, when people see that our relations with both sides have been good, they say: 'Why don't you mediate?' I laugh it off because that's not our role, and ... we're not in a position to do so. US and China don’t need us. They'll have to deal with each other because they are superpowers, both.

But within that space ... big powers are also filling up their data banks. They know they have their own conceived view of another party. (So) they're also sourcing for a ... third party or independent (input). That's where Singapore can be useful, because we're seen as a system that both accommodates east and west - partly language, partly a multiracial composition, but partly because we have first-class diplomatic corps with very good civil service and information flows thick and fast through our system.

So, we give distilled views which stand the test of time as well as experience. Because remember - leaders, when they meet each other from many, many countries, they also get to evaluate what so-and-so said to me previously … They are assessing all the time, and you want to be in the position where somebody says, ‘Oh, this person said this to me, and that really makes sense, and it's tested so that they would value their engagements with you.’

When we say that we support US’ military presence in Asia ... we also say to them that...