SINGAPORE: Singapore will strengthen partnerships with middle powers and regional blocs as it navigates a “geostrategic tectonic plate rupture”, Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said.
Speaking in parliament on Friday (Feb 27) as he laid out his ministry’s priorities for the year, Dr Balakrishnan said that the post-World War II international order – built on multilateralism, international law, free markets, global supply chains and institutions like the United Nations – has come to an end.
The populist backlash against globalisation has been blamed for widening inequality, middle-class stagnation, job losses, growing despair and deep polarisation, he said.
“This domestic dysfunction has now projected itself onto the global stage, and you’ll see that this has undermined the support for the international order,” he added.
“This is not just a small tremor. This is a geostrategic tectonic plate rupture.”
The consequences, he warned, are already reshaping how nations behave. Great powers are increasingly willing to flex their military and economic power in pursuit of their interests, with “less pretence of legal or moral justification”.
“Where there was once economic integration, there is now fragmentation and weaponisation of interdependence and dependence,” he said.
“We are now in a world where international relations are no longer driven primarily by rules or by attempts to achieve consensus.”
For small states that lack the strategic heft to buffer themselves from turbulence, the world has become dangerous, Dr Balakrishnan said.
“For Singapore, a tiny city-state, the shoals are even more treacherous.”
He added, however, that Singapore has “never been naive” and has always operated with a “deep vein of realism”.
Size and power matter in foreign relations, and he noted that disagreement, coercion and even conflict are part of the “cut-and-thrust” of international relations. That is why Singapore has spent between 3 per cent and 6 per cent of its gross domestic product on defence for six decades, he added.