Singapore's security paradigm in the 2000s is an experiment in progress. Pre-existing doctrines expressed as extensions of deterrence or of locking down homeland security are increasingly anachronistic, even if the government of Singapore maintains that they are not irrelevant. Instead, this chapter proposes that Singapore has entered the phase of deliquescent security. What is to be protected and the source of the threat are both mobile and existential, even embedded in the design of taken-for-granted flows of labour, tourism, trade, finance and information. The object and referent of security under globalising conditions are therefore liquid; they dissolve, or exist in a latent state, until ignited by a confluence of flows that challenge the very essence of a Singaporean national identity. This is what I label the deliquescent security paradigm. Incidentally, it can only come into existence following the cumulative effects of conventional external security and domestic security against revolutionary subversion. Conventional external security presupposes a visible and deterrable enemy, armed with tanks, aircraft and a recognisable army threatening to cross one's borders with impunity. If the enemy attacks one's territory with non-uniformed “volunteers” and agents provocateur hidden in legitimate political parties and other social organisations, then deterrence fails to address the root of the threat. As Richard Clutterbuck put it in one of the earliest studies of Singapore's domestic security contextualised during the Cold War, the threat was revolution from within. It was a Leninist stratagem: “an attempt to gain control of student and labour organisations and of a leading political party…; the process being assisted by strikes, student demonstrations and riots.” Clutterbuck also correctly appraised Singapore's mostly urban context for domestic security: “City people live from week to week, relying for next week's food on work, wages and a continuing system of wholesale and retail distribution; they also fear the failure of public services, such as water, sewerage, electric power and transport; they therefore have a vested interest in law and order; faced by chaos and a choice between two claimants to power, they will rally to the one which gives them most confidence of a return to normal life — as the Bolsheviks did in Petrograd in 1917.” The point about urban destabilisation is relevant to this chapter in the sense that by 1965, given the successive waves of urbanisation of the transient population fostered by British colonialism, the nascent Singaporean population has gradually evolved the desire for a multifaceted security that transcends the mere protection of borders. Even during the Cold War, as Clutterbuck pointedly suggests, there was already a yearning for system security, supply security, occupational security and governmental legitimacy. The communists were a viable rival to the People's Action Party (PAP) government insofar as they were promising the mostly urban population stability in their lives and a secure identity in living in a modernising city-state.