Professor Thomas Poole delivers Visiting Tan Ah Tah Professorial Lecture

On 11 August, Professor Thomas Poole delivered a lecture titled “False Friend: The Frailties and Pathologies of Alliances” at NUS Law.

Modern geopolitics has thrown the question of alliances into sharp relief. Alliances are habitually valorised as guarantees of security and friendship, binding states into a shared future. The alliance is an ancient political technology: the late Bronze Age network of treaties, gifts and correspondence, shows how diplomacy can transform hostility into mutual reliance.

Yet alliances also harbour pathologies. They can drag states into wars, as Europe’s alliance system did in 1914, and can suffer from a credible commitment problem—promises are only as persuasive as others believe them to be. Alliances also vary in equality. Though structured as an agreement between presumptive equals, many treaties are in fact hierarchical. The Trump era has exposed imperial expectations within alliances—demands for fealty rather than consultation—risking corrosion of trust.

The lecture pursues Montesquieu’s intuition that alliances must be seen as just to bind; when one party commands and the other merely complies, legitimacy evaporates. The result is costly power: coercion raises the price of security, and the fragile political goods of trust and confidence, once eroded, are hard to restore—even as genuine alliances become more vital.

The Tan Ah Tah Professorship in Law was established at NUS Law in honour of Singapore’s first local Supreme Court Justice. It was endowed by Justice Tan’s daughter, the late Mrs Eileen Tan Siew Lean, in celebration of his ground-breaking achievements and many years of legal service.

Justice Tan studied law at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and Inner Temple in London in the 1920s. He made history in Singapore by becoming the first local to be appointed as a Supreme Court Judge in 1955 when Singapore was still a British colony. From 18 August 1958 to 5 January 1959, he served as Acting Chief Justice.

In 1963, he was appointed as Judge of Singapore’s Supreme Court in the post-colonial period (he was also a Judge of Appeal from 1964 to 1969), altogether serving in the highest court in the land for two decades when he stepped down in 1975, blazing the trail for future generations of lawyers.

In attendance at the lecture was Dr Anne-Marie Schleich, the daughter-in-law of the late Justice Tan; her daughter, Ms Stephanie Tan; and Ms Tan’s spouse, Mr George Carter.

Dr Schleich is a distinguished German career diplomat and an international affairs expert based in Singapore. She serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, where her work focuses on Asia-Pacific geopolitics and international relations.

About Professor Thomas Poole

Professor Thomas Poole is a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include constitutional and administrative law, legal and political theory, foreign relations law, constitutional history, law and empire, and the history of political thought. He is the author of Reason of State: Law, Prerogative and Empire (2015) and co-editor of volumes on Hobbes and the Law (2012), Law, Liberty and State: Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law (2015) and The Double-Facing Constitution: Legal Externalities and the Reshaping of Constitutional Order (2019). He is General Editor of the Modern Law Review and General Editor (with Professor David Dyzenhaus) of Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law.