I expressed my hope that the US will be able to maintain a stable and constructive relationship with China, engaging each other at the highest levels, building trust, establishing institutional mechanisms. And I am quite sure that as their incomes go up, they will buy more and more good American beef. They buy soybeans, grains, and cotton, as well as farming machinery. China is the US' third largest export market for both goods and services for agricultural exports, it is the second largest. It is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Singapore, like many other countries, watch your relations with China very closely. President Trump will be visiting China in a few weeks' time as part of his first visit to Asia. The US will need to work with others, including China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to resolve the issue. Pressure is necessary but so is dialogue. I shared with President Trump what Singapore has done to pressure and to isolate the DPRK, going beyond UN Security Council resolutions.īut there is no quick and easy solution. These pose a serious threat to regional and international peace and stability. And like the US, we condemn the DPRK's dangerous provocations. We strongly oppose the nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, as it affects the peace and stability of the region. President Trump and I naturally discussed the situation on the Korean Peninsula. And as I told President Trump when we met, Singapore will extend our existing deployment to the operation into 2018 for an additional year.

We were one of the first countries to participate and are still the only Asian country to have contributed both military assets and personnel.

Singapore has lent early and consistent support to the Defeat-ISIS Coalition. We have a close partnership, too, on security cooperation, including transnational security, terrorism, and cybersecurity. In fact, our Chinooks and military personnel in Grand Prairie were deployed to assist in the Hurricane Harvey disaster relief operations, and we are glad to have been of some help to our very gracious hosts. We have forces at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix and in Marana, also in Arizona at Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho at Grand Prairie in Texas and in Fort Sill, Oklahoma – where I spent three months many years ago. We thank the US for hosting more than 1,000 Singapore military personnel each year in training detachments in the United States. Since 1990, we have hosted USAF and Navy aircraft and ships on rotational deployments. Singapore supports a military presence in Asia. It will further modernise SIA's fleet and will also support many American jobs. President Trump and I just witnessed a signing between Singapore Airlines (SIA) and Boeing for SIA to purchase 39 Boeing aircraft worth US$13.8 billion. And I discovered recently, looking at my sports shoes, at my New Balance shoes, which are very good, are made in the US, probably in New England.Īnd of course, we buy Boeing jets.

And on a per capita basis, we must be one of the highest-buying American customers in the world – US$7,500 worth of American goods and services yearly – iPhones, pharmaceutical products, tires, golf clubs, financial and consultancy services. In other words, America exported US$43 billion of goods and services to Singapore. The US has consistently run a substantial trade surplus with Singapore. For example, we are the second largest Asian investor in the US, with more than US$70 billion in stock investments, and our total trade in goods and services amounted to more than US$68 billion last year. Singapore is a small country – we are just 5.5 million – but we have sizable investments and trade with the US, and these continue to grow. On the economic front, the US is an important partner for many countries in Asia, just as Asia is an important economic partner for the United States. We also discussed what more we could do to take it forward. It is a deep and wide relationship with substantial cooperation in economic, defence, and security spheres. We reaffirmed the robust and enduring partnership between Singapore and the United States (US) over the last 51 years. We had a wide-ranging exchange in the Oval Office and then over lunch. I am very happy to visit him in Washington following our first meeting, which was at the G20 Summit in Hamburg in July. Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank President Trump for his very warm hospitality. Remarks by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong

Trump press conference