Asian Values
The significance of the debate over ‘Asian values’ in the mid-1990s is that it was a response to the agenda of enlarging the scope of free markets and democracy that was set out by President Clinton’s first national security adviser, Anthony Lake, in 1993. Attempting to sketch out a new vision and sense of purpose for the United States in the new era after the end of the Cold War, and drawing on the popular academic of the time that democracies do not go to war with each other, Lake called for a concerted effort by Americans to expand the scope of democracy and free markets, which, once adopted, in addition to their intrinsic merits, were thought to lead ineluctably to democratization. This doctrine prompted the United States for the first time to challenge some of its allies and friends in Asia whose political systems fell short of what Americans took to be the proper standards of democracy. Erstwhile friends of the United States in East Asia, notably the leaders of Malaysia and Singapore, took great exception to suddenly becoming the objects of criticism and to being subject to pressure to reform their political systems.