Visit Is First by Foreign Warship to New Base : Singapore Welcomes U.S. Aircraft Carrier 
International Herald Tribune
March 22, 2001
Michael Richardson 

Amid increasing turmoil in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, Singapore, a small island state that has made itself prosperous through trade, is holding out a welcome mat for the United States in the hope that it will help to stabilize the region, Singapore officials and analysts say.

On Thursday, the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk will become the first foreign warship to berth at a base being built for the Singapore Navy on 86 hectares (212 acres) of reclaimed land overlooking the Malacca Strait, the busiest international shipping lane in the world.

The docking of the carrier will mark the increasingly close military ties between the United States and Singapore, even though there is no alliance or treaty between the two countries.

Singapore's deputy prime minister and defense minister, Tony Tan, said on a recent tour of the new Changi Naval Base, which will not be completed until 2003, that it was being constructed to meet the needs of the Singapore Navy.

"However, it is no secret that Singapore believes that the presence of the U.S. military in this part of the world contributes to the peace and stability of the region," he said. "To that extent, we have facilitated the presence of U.S. military forces."

U.S. warships and air force planes visit Singapore regularly, in transit or for exercises.

But aircraft carriers and their large naval escorts previously had to moor in the commercial harbor — where security is more difficult to guarantee — because there was no naval base large enough to fit them in.

The only other pier in Southeast Asia big enough to berth a carrier is at Port Klang in Malaysia, where the government of Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad is a frequent critic of U.S. policies although it also allows U.S. warships to call at Malaysian ports.

The deep-draft vessel pier at the Changi Naval Base, part of 6.2 kilometers (4 miles) of wharf space, is not needed at present by the Singapore Navy, which has no warship larger than a frigate.

But the pier will make it easier to provision and maintain big U.S. warships, including aircraft carriers, that are on patrol in Asian waters or moving to and from the Gulf region via the Malacca Strait, the main waterway used by both commercial and naval ships passing between the Pacific and Indian oceans.

"Singapore, at the mouth of the Malacca Strait, is a strategic location for the U.S. Navy," said Rear Admiral Mark Edwards, commander of the navy's Logistics Group, Western Pacific. "This is important because of the amount of trade that transits through the strait, which economically impacts the region and other Pacific allies as well."

The strait passes Indonesia and Malaysia as well as Singapore. Japan and South Korea, two key Asian allies of the United States, depend heavily on freedom of navigation and security in the strait for their oil and raw material supplies.

So, too, increasingly does China, Asia's rising power, which is importing ever larger amounts of oil from the gulf.

To alert the region, Singapore announced a couple of years ago that its deep-draft naval pier would be available for U.S. aircraft carriers to use. Mr. Tan said recently that it would also be open to "other foreign navies" — a phase some analysts said was intended to include, and placate, China.

China has not commented publicly on the plan, although its formal position is to oppose U.S. bases in the region as relics of the Cold War. Some Western analysts believe Beijing's longer term strategy is to work to end the American military presence in the region.

Most of the 100,000 U.S. troops based in East Asia are in Japan and South Korea, close to China. They would probably be the front line of any American intervention force in the event of a crisis over Taiwan, as would the carrier Kitty Hawk and its escorts, which are based in Yokosuka, Japan.

"While Singapore may be the most open advocate of the U.S. presence, there is a regional consensus that such a presence is a stabilizing one," said Melina Nathan, associate research fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, although she added that Singapore was eager to see the Bush administration engage, not confront, China.

Singapore hopes that by rolling out a military welcome mat it will help to keep America anchored in the region.

"With the end of the Cold War, Southeast Asia has become less important in the strategic calculation of the United States," George Yeo, Singapore's minister for trade and industry and a former military intelligence chief, said during a visit to Washington last week.

Noting that the international strait passing Singapore was "the busiest shipping lane in the world," he said that the importance of Southeast Asia should never be underestimated.

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune