As recounted in the book "Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas" an American journalist working on a documentary in Singapore once reportedly told the legendary Singaporean leader that she had gone jogging in the city streets near her hotel at 2:00 a.m. the night before.
The journalist went on to note that she would have been crazy to do such a thing in any city in the United States but had felt perfectly safe doing so in Singapore.
Stories like this were common under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew.
As even today, years after his death, Singapore remains among the world’s safest places.
This writer had the opportunity to witness this firsthand when he had the privilege of residing for several years in Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew in the early 1990s.
As anyone who has lived there can attest, the streets were clean and crime free, government services were competent and efficient.
The schools were amazing.
By his own admission, Lee Kuan Yew was a no-nonsense sort of a leader, who did what needed to be done to build and maintain a prosperous and orderly society with high standards of living.
Of course, in the West, he was regularly denounced as an authoritarian, and heavily criticized for his harsh approach towards crime and punishment.
Lee Kuan Yew shrugged off this criticism, knowing that his country’s fantastic success and the popular support of his citizens provided the greatest retort to his critics.
Currently, El Salvador is attempting to become the Singapore of Central America, with their President Nayib Bukele following closely in Lee Kuan Yew’s footsteps.
As The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted, in only a few years’ time Bukele has taken El Salvador from having the world’s highest murder rate and turned it into Central America’s safest country.
Like Lee Kuan Yew, Bukele has accomplished this feat by taking a hardline approach to crime and punishment; including the mass incarceration of the criminals and gangs that have long plagued his nation.
According to The Wall Street Journal, this has resulted in El Salvador's homicides dropping by a staggering 92% compared with 2015.
While the number of Salvadorans illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border fleeing crime has dropped by 44%.
El Salvador’s economy is also flourishing, with many businesses now prospering without the persistent threat of gang violence. Foreign investment has followed as well.
But despite this overwhelming success, like Lee Kuan Yew, Bukele too is now castigated by many in the West as a dangerous and inhumane authoritarian.
Though evidently, the El Salvadorans themselves think otherwise, with polling showing an astounding nine of every 10 Salvadorans in support of Bukele and his policies.
But Bukele, like Lee Kuan Yew before him, presents a direct threat to many in the West and their soft on crime progressive ideology which prioritizes the rights of criminals over those of their victims.
One need only contrast Bukele’s and Lee Kuan Yew’s policies with those prevailing now in U.S. cities — the results speak for themselves.
Once great American cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco have become veritable war zones, filled with violent crime, decrepitude, and filth.
They are places where innocent people are regularly accosted as they commute on mass transit, where vagrants do drugs and defecate openly on the streets in broad daylight, and where ordinary goods must be locked away for fear that they will be stolen with impunity.
These cities have also suffered economically as a result with people and businesses fleeing them in droves, condemning those left behind to ever less opportunities and higher tax burdens.
But Lee Kuan Yew and Bukele prove that it does not have to be this way.
That even in the worst areas, as El Salvador once was, an alternative future of clean safe streets and thriving businesses and neighborhoods exists.
And contrary to the recently expressed sentiments of the former Vice President Mike Pence, this dreadful state of American cities is and very much should be our concern.
For whether Americans dwell in the countryside or in the city they deserve and should be entitled to live, work, and raise their families in a place free from the constant menace of crime and violence.
Indeed, why shouldn’t Americans have cities where jogging in the middle of the night is considered perfectly safe?
Why should this not be the standard we seek to achieve? And what is stopping us from it?
As Lee Kuan Yew and Bukele have shown the answer is nothing, other than the will.
Lee Steinhauer is a strategic policy and political consultant known for his book "The Art of The New Cold War: America vs China. What America Must Do to Win." Lee is a frequent guest on Fox, Fox Business, Newsmax, and a published policy and opinion writer for numerous media publications. Read Lee Steinhauer's Reports — More Here.
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