With Or Without China, Shangri-La Dialogue Is Still Relevant

Singapore's former Ministry of Foreign Affairs permanent secretary, Bilahari Kausikan, affirmed as much on the sidelines of this year's SLD:“The Shangri-La Dialogue was always primarily about anchoring the US in Southeast Asia.” IISS should own this assessment, rather than equivocate when critics call it out.

China's Xiangshan Forum, which draws ASEAN and Global South defense ministers each September, is a rational response. So was Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's choice to attend the Munich Security Conference in February 2026 rather than Singapore in May.

He went where he could contest the normative order at its weakest, not where Chinese hard power is already the operating assumption among Indo-Pacific neighbors.

I make these points because the SLD should not simultaneously try to be both an American-anchored forum and a neutral platform for US-China ministerial dialogue to remain relevant and purposeful. Given today's state of regional geopolitical contest, those are structurally incompatible functions.

If SLD exists to anchor US commitment to the Indo-Pacific, then Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and other American-aligned states are not merely attending a dialogue but are also using SLD as a stage to reaffirm Washington's regional role.

China has no rational or strategic interest in legitimizing a forum that is structured around that purpose. Expecting Beijing to do so is asking a competitor to dignify its opponent's press conference.

And because Singapore is hosting the conference, its local defense community should stop expressing“disappointment” at China's absence. Lamenting it signals confusion about what SLD is for.

Worse still, mistaking SLD for a neutral convening platform – and then acting surprised when China declines – is self-deception. Singapore hosts SLD as an institutional choice and its internal clarity about the forum's structural meaning must follow.

This confusion about the SLD reflects a broader problem: mistaking the momentum of multilateral activity for the substance of deterrence.

Fernandez references the Guiding Principles for Underwater Infrastructure Defense Exchanges framework (GUIDE), Japan-Australia agreements, and middle-power Plan B architectures in his essay. He said that middle powers are“seeking agency – not just to adapt to a changing world, but to shape it.”

But shaping a security order (even a regional one) requires the ability to impose costs on a major power that is seeking to contest it.

Threat perception can be defined as intent multiplied by capability. In deterrence, intent matters little if a power lacks the capability to act on it, or if its capability is inferior to that of its competitor.

As US War Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the SLD, a favorable balance of power requires“capable allies with genuine military strength, industrial capacity and political resolve.” On this point, Hegseth is right.

For any smaller state, autonomy exists in the space that competing great powers leave open as they constrain one another.

In Singapore's case, its ability to speak sincerely to both Washington and Beijing, to host the SLD and send ministers to Xiangshan, and to maintain the Agreement on Defense Exchanges and Security Cooperation with China while deepening US access arrangements, depends entirely on that balance of power remaining credible.

It's worth noting that Singapore established an MOU granting US forces access to Sembawang and Changi in 1990, anchoring America's forward presence before Singapore formalized defense ties with Beijing in 2008, from a position of strength. As Singapore enhanced the ADESC in October 2019, it also renewed the MOU with the US on base access through 2035.

In short, Singapore was able to deepen ties with both major powers because the balance was assured.

Keeping that balance on an even keel enables Singapore to stay friends with all. To illustrate this point, I'll reference two of my earlier essays.

The first concerns Singapore's September 2025 decision to acquire four Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft. The US$2.3 billion platform is US-built, US-interoperable and optimized for anti-submarine warfare in precisely the waters whose stability is undergirded by a US-led architecture.