After Shangri-La: Asia Is No Longer Asking Washington's Permission |
After Shangri-La: Asia Is No Longer Asking Washington’s Permission
At the 23rd Shangri-La Dialogue 2026 held in Singapore and attended by 44 countries, the real story was not the reaffirmation of the US-led Indo-Pacific order but its slow, public unraveling.
The Speech That Misread the Room
It was a speech that alienated the very audience it sought to lead. In fact, as events show, the starkest divide at the Dialogue was not between Washington and Beijing; it was between Washington and its own partners. ASEAN, alongside the European Union, remains among the world’s most committed advocates of multilateral diplomacy and rules-based order. Telling such an audience, at a conference, that conferences are superfluous was a striking misreading of the room.
The dissonance ran deeper than tone. Hegseth’s capture of Maduro was widely condemned across Southeast Asia as a violation of international law. US strikes on Iran, and their economic reverberations through the Strait of Hormuz, had already disrupted petrochemical supply chains across the region and fuelled public unease. European NATO allies present at the Dialogue were conspicuously equivocal about both episodes. Meanwhile, Hegseth’s softer line on China — promoting “constructive strategic stability” following Trump’s Beijing summit — sat in uncomfortable tension with his simultaneous demand that regional partners build up military capabilities to counter Chinese power. Washington was, in effect, asking its partners to arm for a threat it was publicly downgrading. The contradiction could not have been more evident and harder to accept for the ‘partner’ states.
The fundamental problem was not rhetorical but structural: the United States continues to demand alignment while demonstrating, through its conduct in Venezuela and........