Singapore, as a small but strategically located city-state and financial hub, seeks to preserve its security and regional stability by acting as a maritime steward, diplomatic convener, and advocate for rules-based norms amid intensifying US–China rivalry.

It prioritizes ASEAN centrality and balanced relations with both major powers, while using platforms such as management of the Malacca and Singapore Straits and the Shangri-La Dialogue to reduce tensions and support a transparent regional order.

By promoting norms in emerging domains such as cybersecurity and digital governance, Singapore aims to protect the interests of small states and prevent strategic competition from fragmenting the Indo-Pacific into pure power politics.

The Indo-Pacific is today the focal point of global competition between major powers, in an environment characterized by multiple security interactions and by an increasing number of non-conventional challenges. Within this strategic space, the modestly-sized yet highly-interconnected sovereign state and financial center of Singapore occupies a singular position. By virtue of its relative weakness in terms of military might as well as geographic extension, the city-state serves as a vital node within the region’s emerging architecture for security. 

To guarantee its own safety and stability, and by extension, that of the region, Singapore intends to contribute to the archiving of the latter by means of stewardship of the maritime domain as well as by way of numerous diplomatic initiatives, the ultimate aim of all of which is the promotion of a set of unwritten yet solidly rooted international norms. In a world rapidly fragmenting under the pressure of mounting strategic competition between the United States and China, the relevance of a modest-sized city-state such as Singapore within a region furthermore rapidly evolving in character is to provide a foundation which will at all costs guarantee the stability, transparency and rules-based nature of the structures of a region rapidly becoming more and more regional........

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