Lee Kuan Yew's choice of democratic India over communist China in the 1950s underscored the political logic of Singapore's relations with Beijing, which were far less warm than its ties with New Delhi on Singapore's independence in 1965. Other factors supporting the Singapore view were that communist China was helping insurgencies in Southeast Asia, and that Beijing was an ethnic source of attraction to Chinese in the region. Lee's People's Action Party (PAP), democratic socialist and anti-communist in orientation, had to contend with the dual pulls of ideology and ethnicity that China exercised on the Chinese majority in Singapore, where the PAP was pledged to the principle of multiracialism and not nationalism predicated on Chinese supremacy. India, by contrast with China, identified itself with the ideals of democracy, socialism and non-alignment, these values being consonant with the PAP's self-definition and worldview as well.

Yet, in the decade and a half after Singapore's independence, several trends redrew the Asian security landscape that Singapore inhabited. The Sino-Indian War of 1962 rebuffed hopes of Third World internationalism inaugurated by the Bandung Conference of 1955, in whose spirit of Afro-Asian solidarity had originated the Non-Aligned Movement that was established in 1961. Dawn in Bandung was overtaken by the high noon of colonial retrenchments, superpower initiatives, and consequent alignments that marked Asia's trajectory from the mid-1960s onwards. Britain announced in 1967 that it would withdraw its forces in Malaysia and Singapore by the mid-1970s, a date that was subsequently brought forward to 1971. The Sino-Soviet split, which had begun in the late 1950s, peaked in 1969. The Soviet Union's Asian collective security proposal, first advanced by Nikita Khruschev in 1956, was taken up by Leonid Brezhnev in 1969 as a means of containing China, whose domestic and foreign policies by then were convulsed by a Cultural Revolution that revived fears of Beijing as an unpredictable and destabilizing force in Asian politics. The Soviet security proposal came on the heels of the Brezhnev Doctrine of 1968, which asserted Moscow's control over Warsaw Pact countries and its right to define “socialism” and “capitalism” in its relations with socialist countries, which would not be allowed to deviate from Soviet leadership in their conduct of domestic politics and international relations.