The Vance Doctrine Meets the Singapore Model: A Small State’s Dilemma
Why the Vice President's turn against efficiency echoes a lesson Singapore already learned — and why that should worry us most.
The Vance Doctrine Meets the Singapore Model: A Small State’s Dilemma
There is a quiet revolution underway in how the American right thinks about economics, and if you run a business in Singapore — as I do — it is worth paying attention. Not because American politics is entertaining, but because the ideas taking hold in Washington could, if they spread, reshape the very conditions that made Singapore rich.
The clearest recent articulation comes from US Vice President JD Vance, in a June 2026 interview with Michael Knowles. It repays close reading, because Vance is not simply repeating tariff talking points. He is making a philosophical argument — and, uncomfortably for Singapore, it is an argument our own recent history partly confirms.
What Vance Actually Said
Vance’s core claim is that the American right has migrated from Milton Friedman to Alexander Hamilton. The Reagan-Friedman consensus — tax cuts, deregulation, unlimited globalisation, and faith that the market will sort itself out — is, in his telling, being replaced by something older and more interventionist. Hamilton’s tradition holds that government should actively build the tools, infrastructure and industrial capacity that support domestic producers, even if that means paying a price in the race for hyper-globalised efficiency. Vance is careful to frame this not as crude protectionism but as national developmentalism: the state deliberately cultivating its own workers, communities and industries for the sake of long-term national strength.
His most interesting move is historical. Why did Friedman’s laissez-faire make sense in the 1980s but need adjustment now? Because, Vance argues, free markets were once advocated inside a country that still possessed a rich and powerful institutional Christianity. In his words, Friedman’s ideas “made more sense in the 1980s, in part because it was being argued in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity.” The churches, families and communities functioned as invisible guardrails — “Christian guardrails,” he calls them — that restrained the market’s harshest effects and kept society from dissolving. Strip those guardrails away, as decades of secular, globalised liberalism have done, and pure market logic starts producing hollowed-out towns, offshored factories and unstable families.
Underneath all of this sits Vance’s real yardstick: human dignity. “The economy is a tool to service the dignity of the human person,” he says. A good economic policy is one that makes it easier for an ordinary person to raise a family, earn a living wage, contribute to their community, perhaps attend church on Sunday, and find the leisure to build a meaningful life. Economic growth matters — but the moment growth becomes an idol, we sacrifice the very things that make prosperity worth having: family, community, faith, and what he calls the full flourishing of the person. He extends this into a critique of elite meritocracy, which turns ambition into a game of outdoing others and persuades people to trade time with their children for a higher net worth. Nobody, he notes, lies on their deathbed wishing they had earned a little more money.
Whatever one thinks of the theology, the structure of the argument is serious: efficiency is a means, not an end, and a society that optimises for efficiency alone will eventually pay for it in things that do not appear on a balance sheet.
Where Singapore Already Agrees — the Mask Lesson
Here is the awkward part for those of us who instinctively defend openness. Singapore has already learned, at first hand, that efficiency cannot be the only thing that matters.
Cast your mind back to early 2020. As COVID-19 spread and Chinese factories — which supplied roughly half the world’s surgical masks — shut down, Singapore discovered it had essentially no domestic capacity to make face masks. We had optimised, sensibly and profitably, by importing them from whoever made them cheapest. It was the textbook efficient decision. And it left us exposed the moment global supply chains seized and exporting countries restricted outbound shipments to protect their own populations.
The response was telling. Firms from unrelated industries — gaming, printing, robotics — retooled to produce masks locally, and ST Engineering developed the ability to manufacture melt-blown polypropylene, the critical filtration layer at the heart of a surgical mask. Singapore did not conclude “the market will provide.” It concluded that some capabilities are matters of national security and must be built and stockpiled at home, price be damned.
That is, almost word for word, Vance’s point. When it came to something as basic as protecting our own people, we accepted that pure efficiency was a false economy. We paid more to hold capacity we might never need, because the alternative — being unable to protect citizens in a crisis — was intolerable. Vance would recognise this instantly: the economy as a tool in service of something higher than the economy itself.
The Trap Singapore Cannot Escape
So if we agree with Vance on the principle, why should the spread of his doctrine worry us? Because there is a world of difference between a large nation applying this logic and a small one — and between applying it to a handful of strategic goods versus applying it to everything.
Vance’s prescription works because the United States has 330 million consumers and a continental economy. It can turn inward, reshore industries, and still have a market. Singapore cannot. Our trade is roughly three times our GDP; we are the most trade-dependent economy on earth. Our entire model rests on being a node — a port through which other people’s goods pass, a base from which multinationals serve the region, a trusted financial and logistics hub connecting supply chains we ourselves are too small to contain. Openness is not one policy among many for Singapore. It is the industrial policy.
And this is the genuine paradox. In method, Singapore is already deeply Hamiltonian. The EDB, Temasek, GIC, public housing, forced savings through CPF, targeted bets on semiconductors and biomedical science — this is an activist state shaping industry in service of national flourishing, exactly as Vance urges. We simply pointed that statecraft outward, toward the world, because for a resource-less island of six million people, engagement with the world was the only path to strength. Same philosophy, opposite conclusion — dictated entirely by size.
So the honest answer to the question I posed — if nobody cared about efficiency, what would become of Singapore’s standing? — is sobering. A world in which the great powers all turned Hamiltonian, reshoring production and treating cross-border efficiency as a vice, is a world with a smaller total pie and less need for a middleman. Port volumes would fall. Multinationals — many of them the very American firms Vance wants to bring home — would repatriate the operations they now run from here. The free-trade agreements we spent decades assembling would lose their meaning once the biggest players stopped honouring the logic behind them. The country that gained most from globalisation stands to lose most from its retreat.
But note the crucial qualifier. Not everyone can go Hamiltonian; small open economies are the natural losers and will resist, and even the United States is really talking about strategic and critical industries, not literal self-sufficiency. The realistic future is not a closed world but a fragmented, multipolar one — and in a fragmented world, a trusted, neutral connector between rival blocs becomes more valuable, not less. That is the role Singapore has quietly been positioning for: the place both American and Chinese capital can still trust.
The Lesson Within the Lesson
The mask episode taught Singapore that efficiency has limits. Vance is now teaching a superpower the same thing on a far grander scale. The uncomfortable truth for us is that both lessons are correct — and that a world which fully internalised them would be harder on Singapore than on almost anyone else.
The task, then, is not to reject Vance’s insight but to survive its consequences. Build strategic capacity where security demands it, as we did with masks. Climb so far up the value chain — in chips, in medicine, in complex finance — that we are too costly to replace. And sell trust and neutrality as the product when raw efficiency no longer clears the border. Singapore has always made its living by turning the world’s contradictions into an address. The Vance doctrine is simply the next contradiction we will have to profit from.
Sources: JD Vance interview with Michael Knowles (Daily Wire), June 2026; reporting on Singapore’s pandemic mask supply response.