However, that also makes it easier to do the same in times of peace.
I observe this reaching for ideological explanations extremely frequently in US media and citizens, and these lazy rationalizations seem to me to be one of the ways the US public sphere collectively hallucinates that that they are the freest and first in the world, while promoting ideological tribalism and partisanship, as citizens vote away their interests to protect their ideological delusion.
I'd argue that the "smaller country" explanation is also over-used.
For example, when single-payer healthcare, gun control or effective government comes up, I often hear the excuse "The US is way more populous than $nation_x so it would never work here!".
When asked to further explain their reasoning, many (certainly not all) can't seem to. It's like they never think past the nation-size excuse because it's simply accepted as fact.
I suppose what I was getting at was the distance of the highest levels of government from the citizen. Taiwan certainly isn't a small country, but its government is certainly in a closer relationship with its citizens concerns than the federal government is with US citizens.
Generally theres rules. Generally the rules can be changed. But generally rules don't get broken.
This may have been true in the 90s when Singapore was transforming it's economy but it's not true now and hasn't been the case in over a decade. It's a country with a large service economy, well educated workforce, and burgeoning middle class. It's also very tiny with a strong national identity. If the government says they are going to do something, unlike the US, the public trusts they are going to do it.
This would be harder in a city where lots of things date back to the 19th Century, and architects were rarely involved in building them.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-24873-5_...