What Shangri-La 2026 Revealed About the Future Regional Order |
Trans-Pacific View | Security
What Shangri-La 2026 Revealed About the Future Regional Order
Like the CPTPP after the U.S. exit from TPP, the next phase of regional security may be shaped by what U.S. allies and partners build when Washington moves one step back.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivers his speech to the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2026 on May 30, 2026,
At the 2026 Shangri-La Dialogue, two questions dominated the conversations in and around the conference hall. One was why China’s defense minister was absent. The other – less sensational but more important – was how the United States presented its stepping back from the front stage of regional order.
The first question generated much speculation but few firm answers. The second question was more revealing.
What I observed at this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue was Washington remaining militarily powerful and strategically central. Yet it is becoming less willing to act as the loud public manager of a rules-based order. Instead, U.S. allies and partners, especially Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and others, are increasingly being encouraged to carry the visible burden of organizing regional security.
This pattern recalls the moment after the Trump administration withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017. The United States stepped away, but the regional architecture did not simply collapse. Japan took the lead in reorganizing the agreement into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP. Something similar may now be happening in the security realm. The United States is not disappearing, but it is asking its allies to connect the points, build the lines, and gradually turn those lines into a regional security plane.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech captured this shift through three words: “strong, quiet, and clear.” He repeated them almost like a doctrine. In his formulation, the United States would pursue peace through strength, speak less in moralistic language, and clarify both its interests and expectations. The message was not isolationist but positioned the United States as an offshore balancer.
Hegseth insisted that “America is a Pacific nation” and would maintain the military strength needed to prevent any hegemon from dominating the region. But the deeper message was that the old model of alliance management was over. The United States needs “partners, not protectorates,” Hegseth said.
Each of the three words responded to a real dilemma facing the United States and its allies.
The first word, “strong,” addressed the contradiction between U.S. capability and U.S. credibility. Due to the rapid consumption of ammunition in Iran-U.S. war, the U.S. faces a shortage of missiles and other ammunition. Hegseth emphasized that the Trump administration was making a “generational investment” in defense, including a planned $1.5 trillion defense budget, and tried to assure allies that the United States could build a much stronger military industrial capacity in three to five years.
But when I talked to Andrew Nien-Dzu Yang, representative from Taiwan, he was dubious of the U.S. commitment. Japan’s defense minister, Koizumi Shinjiro, also seemed to understand the discomfort. He gently asked Hegseth to give the region a message of reassurance.
Hegseth distinguished between “model allies” and those who “continue to free-ride on the generosity of the American taxpayer.” The reward for the former would be expedited arms sales, deeper industrial-base cooperation, and expanded intelligence sharing. The message to the latter was blunt: the old days are over.
After Hegseth spoke, many U.S. allies and partners seemed almost eager to demonstrate that they were ready to contribute. The mood at times felt less like a formal dialogue and more like an audition for a new hierarchy of burden-sharing.
The second word, “quiet,” revealed a deeper tension between rules and power. Hegseth repeatedly criticized “performative outrage,” “empty rhetoric,” and “globalist” language about the rules-based international order. His line – “less Shangri-La, more ships, more subs” – drew attention because it cut against the very setting in which he was speaking. The United States was telling a room full of defense officials and strategists that dialogue mattered less than hard military capability.
For some allies and middle powers, this was reassuring in one sense and alarming in another. They do want American power. But many of them also need rules. For smaller and middle states, rules are not decorative language. They are what create diplomatic space and strategic agency.
That concern surfaced immediately after Hegseth’s speech. New Zealand’s defense minister responded indirectly but clearly, noting that dialogue and submarines are not contradictory. Australia’s defense minister also defended the value of rules, saying that when rules apply, smaller states have agency. If rules yield to power, he warned, no state in the room, whatever its size, would be well served.
In his own remarks, Japan’s Koizumi placed heavy emphasis on cooperation with Australia, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, the Quad, ASEAN, AUKUS, and other frameworks. His most memorable line was that Japan would “link all these efforts to turn points into lines, and from lines into planes.” It was a revealing phrase. If the United States now prefers to be strong, quiet, and clear, Japan seems prepared to be active, connective, and institutional.
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