Commentators wringing their hands over the state of international affairs these days are fond of quoting (and mangling) the Italian intellectual and philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s famous quotation from a different era: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The morbid symptoms in the global order are self-evident. As Singapore’s leaders have repeatedly observed, multilateralism is eroding, and the old rules-based order has ended. We are exiting an exceptional age in which a single set of global norms was underwritten, however imperfectly, by a single dominant superpower, and backed up by a single set of legitimate international institutions, many of which the primary architect was that very superpower.

What will follow is not certain, but it is clear enough that we are now entering an age of normative plurality. Parts of the older order still exist and remain relevant — think the United Nations (UN), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and so on.

The emergent China-centric order may not be global, but it is already very real. It has its own multilaterals, its own development bank and its own trade settlement mechanisms. And alongside them, there are the mechanisms of the rest, a veritable alphabet soup whose acronyms, EU, OECD, MERCOSUR, and of course ASEAN, which are far from irrelevant.

What is equally clear, as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and others have said, is that we cannot be passive bystanders in this landscape – we have to shape our own future.

Strategic Thrusts

Our foreign policy principles are immutable, but the architecture of our thinking is evolving. The response to this evolving, more plural order has seen a significant evolution in our own foreign policy thinking.

During the 3 March 2025 Committee of Supply (COS) debate, Foreign Affairs Minister Dr Vivian Balakrishnan gave a detailed sense of MFA’s priorities, spelling out for the first time its strategic approach into an explicit five-workstream architecture. Certain priorities, such as engaging all great powers constructively and reinforcing a rules-based international architecture, have deep historical pedigree and are in fact constants in Singapore’s foreign policy vocabulary.

Buttressing middle power partnerships comes closest to being a genuinely novel element, although earlier speeches had Dr Balakrishnan speaking of “building overlapping circles of friends” and “making common cause with as many countries as possible”.

Other leaders are clearly thinking along the same lines. Canadian PM Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 20 January 2026 was widely seen as a rallying cry for middle powers. Mr Carney’s essential argument is that the old rules-based international order was always partly a fiction — the strong exempted themselves when convenient — and now, even the pretence of compliance has collapsed.

In this  “rupture”, he said, middle powers face a stark choice. They can negotiate bilaterally with hegemons from weakness, or pool their collective weight to share the cost of strategic autonomy and sovereignty.

Singapore’s leaders have made similar points but in less stark terms. We should not make too much of the parallels, however. Singapore is not a middle power, and has never claimed to be.

But middle powers are prepared to engage with us. We are relevant and successful. We have shown how a small city-state can run, while respecting the rule of law, international norms and multilateralism. Singapore’s success means it is invited to blocs and groupings like G20, even when we may not be official members of the bloc concerned.

Mutually beneficial arrangements with the likeminded, referred to by Dr Balakrishnan and PM Carney, are coming into sharper focus.

The Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA), founded by Singapore, Chile, and New Zealand, is the world’s first standalone digital trade agreement. As of October 2025, nine aspirant economies (including China, Canada, the UAE and Thailand, to name some) have applied to join. We are also making a play within ASEAN. When DEFA — the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement— is finalised this year (negotiations were concluded in October 2025), it will be the world’s first region-wide, binding agreement focused exclusively on digital economy governance.

These and other arrangements do not mean ignoring big power overtures when they are actually made. As Singapore’s first PM Lee Kuan Yew observed in 1966: “You know, from time immemorial, the small fish is caught between the medium and the big fish and he says Which one shall I….? Best of all, I will be friends with both medium and big fish.”

In December 2025, Singapore signed the non-binding Pax Silica Declaration in Washington D.C. The inaugural summit brought together eight countries with the most cutting-edge AI supply chain ecosystems: Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, Israel, the UAE, the UK and Australia. The initiative aims to build a secure, resilient, and innovation-driven ecosystem across the full technology supply chain — from critical minerals and energy inputs to advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and logistics. We joined this because it is in our interest to support a forward-looking and constructive agenda on technological prowess, in partnership with other like-minded countries. Some, however, insist to see Pax Silica as an explicitly US-led economic security grouping aimed at reducing dependence on China across the AI stack.

Singapore officials mean what they say – but this does not signify that they say what they mean all the time. In this era of geopolitical – and ideological – contestation, agreements and blocs involving one or the other big power will of course have to be weighed with special care.

Singapore has historically avoided joining groupings framed in geopolitical opposition – and also those framed in ideological opposition.

But the point is this: normative spheres will have their own rhetoric and ideology. We will have to learn to be fluent in all of them; if we can do so, we will be an intersection point valuable to all parties. Being “normatively polyglot” will allow us to approach each of our external relationships on its own terms. We already do this – Pax Silica, the Group of Friends of China’s Global Development Initiative, and various other groupings such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), DEPA, and Forum of Small States (FOSS) (which Singapore, Barbados, and Cabo Verde co-founded as an informal body within the UN in 1992), and so on.

“Do More, Say Less, Be Quietly Helpful and Constructive”

We cannot be a passive bystander in the evolving world order; we have agency and can shape our own destiny. In doing so, we have to be more calculated and pragmatic – and recognise that some of what we may have to shape lies beyond Singapore.

There are already signs of this. MFA has a new Development Partnerships Directorate. This aims to coordinate development aid across agencies and strengthen collaborations to help build a more stable, resilient, and inclusive global environment, and to share our experience with others and coordinate our overseas assistance in areas where we feel we can contribute – and where it is in our interests to do so.

In my view, one area where Singapore should do more concerns the issues of cohesion, tolerance and pluralism.

In September 2024, when Pope Francis visited Singapore, he noted “mutual respect, cooperation, dialogue and the freedom to exercise one’s beliefs within the confines of the law” as the conditions that allow for Singapore’s success and stability. Singapore, he observed, had “a specific role to play on the international level” in a world “threatened by conflict and wars that have spilled much blood.”

We should be clear that Singapore and its institutions are already engaged in this effort. We have convening power; the International Conference on Cohesive Societies (ICCS) run by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies with the support of MCCY, is arguably fast developing into the most important conference of its kind. Globally, it brings together researchers, faith and community leaders, and young leaders to discuss in a practical way problems and issues fostering plurality and tolerance.

We should not therefore waste our soft power. We cannot change the way the world works, but as a matter of principle, should approach the world in a way that best preserves what we have and value at home.

Even as we help others to help themselves, we should continue to be sober and non-judgemental. The idea is not necessarily to lead from the front, but to showcase our approaches in a non-ideological way. Efforts should never give any sign of cultural superiority or the belief that our values, and our achievements (stability, good policymaking etc) somehow put us higher in the pecking order.

Foreign policy literacy

Dr Balakrishnan has said that foreign policy begins at home – this can mean that a nation’s external strength and sovereignty depend on domestic unity, and any weakness here can be assessed and exploited by others.

Singapore has progressed in recent years in educating people on what really is at stake.

“Being principled” is easy to understand and resonates with the Singaporean psyche; we live in a society that has a truly principled belief in law and fairness. For where law, fairness, and accepted norms are concerned, large parts of the rest of the world increasingly do not work the way Singapore does. How the Singapore government politically sustains something this abstract will have to be a topic of public education and outreach – including in schools.

In describing the current breakdown of international norms and rules of the road, Dr Balakrishnan quoted the Greek historian Thucydides: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. The line comes from the Melian Dialogue,  in which the leaders of the small island of Melos responded courteously and respectfully to Athenian demands that they join Athens in its war against Sparta. In an attempt to preserve its neutrality, Melos’ leaders appealed to justice and good sense, but appeals to good sense increasingly went unheeded in that war, as they do in the current era. Athens besieged Melos, and upon its fall, executed the men and enslaved the women and children.

Such a fate is not going to befall Singapore anytime soon. But Dr Balakrishnan, a learned man, would not have missed the analogy. Saying “no” can carry a price and we cannot know what retaliation others may choose to inflict.

Acting rationally to optimise Singapore’s outcomes may cause offence or may antagonise states which in previous times may have had the understanding – or finesse – to accept our views and positions. They may retaliate far more harshly than we have been accustomed to. Still, as the minister has said: “… if we ever lose that ability to say no, then that is the day that Singapore loses its relevance – indeed, our independence”.

We have always known this. In 1983, Ambassador Tommy Koh said at the UN with regard to Singapore’s opposition to the US invasion of Grenada: “…it is easy enough for us to demonstrate our adherence to principle when to do so is convenient and advantageous and costs us nothing. The test of a country’s adherence to principle is when it is inconvenient to do so”.

Our opposition to Grenada was hardly surprising given our track record on sovereignty and territorial integrity. Explaining the vote to the Commonwealth leaders meeting in New Delhi, then-PM Lee Kuan Yew said that Singapore had voted at the UN against the “dangerous precedents it could create”. And yet, he added, Singapore was glad the invasion had taken place, because stability had been restored after a violent coup. “One could talk about principles and define, redefine and refine them to sophistry”, Lee remarked, but each leader knew in his heart those who had supported the invasion were in fact right. Lee’s intervention — a classic example of pragmatism and not over-moralising — turned the meeting away from recrimination and towards the real question: the security of small states. The Commonwealth Consultative Group set up in its wake produced a 1985 report that was the first to highlight the inherent vulnerability of small states to external interference.

Pragmatism also means working to mend and restore relations when these have frayed.

In December 1975, Singapore was the only ASEAN country to abstain while the remainder opposed a UN General Assembly resolution deploring Indonesian military intervention in East Timor. This created some strains in our bilateral relationship with Indonesia. Indonesian reactions were seen, for example, in boycotts of our National Day receptions, delays in implementing joint military exercises and Indonesian spokesmen commenting on Singapore’s unfriendly attitude.

Nevertheless, our calibrated diplomacy over the following years meant there was no irreparable break. At the first ASEAN Summit held in Bali (February 1976), PM Lee gave Indonesia’s then-President Soeharto full limelight and credit for what was a historic moment in its own right. We emerged from the Summit with a stronger Soeharto-Lee relationship. By 1977, while Singapore still did not recognise the annexation de jure, we had elected not to oppose it actively.

These might seem to be near-forgotten historical curiosities, but there is a relevance to the present. Faced with the patent injustices of the international environment will require emotional discipline, responding to developments not from a position of indignation or conviction of how things ought to be, but pragmatically according to how things are and what our interests and various relationships demand.

Archival releases from agencies, and projects such as the upcoming Founders’ Memorial, should honour  how our pioneer leaders threaded the needle in finding Singapore a place among nations.

Our first foreign minister, S. Rajaratnam, envisioned Singapore as a global city – a city that thrives precisely because of its interconnections with the world. But he and those who came after him also knew that disorder and volatility have always been endemic – indeed an appreciation of these forces and the ability to navigate them is ingrained and transmitted in the DNA of Singapore’s leaders and our foreign policy and security establishment. Mr Rajaratnam said at his last public talk in office on foreign policy that Singapore is “but…a winding and weaving travel through rough and dangerous territory with roaming predatory carnivores”. Almost four decades on, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, approving the 2026 Budget, warned that we need to brace ourselves for a “long storm of global instability”.

The language has changed; the reality has not. A normatively plural world, while more challenging to articulate and explain to our people, does not need to be irrational — nor even unfamiliar. In the longer historical perspective, Singapore exists precisely as an intersection between frequently irreconcilable differences of race, language, and religion. Ours is not a cosmopolitanism of grand ideals. It is a cosmopolitanism of pragmatism, forged through our history as an entrepôt at the heart of a polyglot region.

Academics are wont to talk of  “grand strategy”. Singapore does not have, or rely on such a construct — our foremost interest is survival. From Rajaratnam’s carnivores to President Tharman’s storm, that has always been enough to concentrate the mind.

Without such an appreciation, refined consistently over decades, I doubt Singapore would have taken the trajectory that it did, or be in the position it is now.

 

Dr Shashi Jayakumar is Founder and Executive Director of SJK Geostrategic Advisory Pte Ltd, a geopolitical and security consultancy firm.

Top photo from Canva.