Why The West Does Not Work Anymore

Eli Vered Hazan had been Israel’s ambassador to Singapore for ten weeks when October 7 happened.

“It was a terrible day,” he told me. “That was the first time I discovered that even when you are on the right side, there are people who think that you’re the devil.”

He was watching the war from a country wedged between Malaysia and Indonesia, with a Malay Muslim community of 14 percent and a government under real pressure to cut ties with Israel. Singapore refused. It held to its neutrality, its belief in international law, and one firm request to the new ambassador: do not bring the conflict here.

His response says a lot about him. Within days he redirected the embassy away from politics and social media entirely and toward one thing: economics. “To bring money into the Israeli economy and to diversify the relations,” as he put it. The result was a record year in Israel–Singapore economic ties, achieved during a war, alongside open disagreements with a government that insists on supporting a Palestinian state. “Although we had disagreements, we had a very candid, open dialogue.”

Three years of watching that country up close produced his new book, Singapore: The Model That Works. The title came from his father-in-law, who heard him describe the system and named it before he did.

The book’s claim is blunt. “Singapore is not perfect, but it’s much better than any other country I’ve been to,” Hazan said. “And I’ve been to 43 countries.” Then the sentence that carries the whole project: “The West does not work anymore, and the Singaporean system is working.”

What is that system? Not capitalism, not socialism, he argues, but a third thing Singaporeans call pragmatism. He tells a story about a Singaporean professor he once complimented on running an interesting capitalist country. The professor laughed and said no, we are socialists. And in a sense he was right: 80 percent of Singaporeans live in public housing, and government-linked companies sit across the economy. Yet nearly everything can be imported without customs duties, and the market is among the freest on earth. The book spends 71 chapters mapping this hybrid, from economy and education to health and land.

The land alone tells the story. Since 1965 Singapore has expanded its territory by 25 percent through reclamation, as Hazan put it, “without shooting one shot.” A country of 49 by 28 kilometers holds six million people with barely a traffic jam. In 1964, Chinese and Malays were killing each other in race riots. The state’s answer was to make racial harmony a legal and educational foundation, enforced without apology. Corruption was engineered out the same way: a powerful anti-corruption authority, and a prime minister paid like a CEO so that the best people run the country and stealing becomes a bad trade.

I asked him what Israel and the West should actually take from all this. His three answers: social harmony imposed as firmly as Singapore imposed it, safety as a non-negotiable public good, and Singapore’s economic statecraft, above all a bureaucracy he describes as strong but effective. “This is something that does not exist in the West.”

There is a next chapter to this story. Hazan is now becoming World Chairman of Keren Hayesod, the century-old institution that raises funds across the Jewish world for Israeli society. The lessons are moving with him: meritocracy, scholarships for excellent Israeli youngsters, and funding the wave of Jewish immigration Israel hopes to absorb after October 7. A man who spent three years studying how a state builds itself now takes over an institution built for exactly that.

Who should read the book? His answer: leaders first, ministers, parliamentarians, people who govern. And then anyone “who wants to change their perceptions when it comes to life.”

The full conversation is on the omec podcast. Singapore: The Model That Works is available on Amazon worldwide.