News this week included: local robotic-hands firm Sharpa joins Nvidia and Unitree on humanoid robot project; a new registry of AI agents for 150,000 public officers; the Religious Rehabilitation Group studies the impact of AI and tech on radicalisation; life expectancy in Singapore hits new highs; only 61 percent of people surveyed find our roads safe; KT&T Engineers and Constructors, a foreign worker dormitory operator, charged with numerous failures, including faulty urinals, holes in the walls and no shower curtains in a communal toilet; three Chinese nationals charged with robbing S$50,000 in cash at MBS from a Chinese woman who wanted them to convert it; CNA on the hidden costs of high dental fees on an ageing population; CNA on the implications of homegrown food brands outsourcing production abroad; ST on how to evacuate when a medical emergency strikes overseas; ST commentary on the importance of anti-drug conversations at the dinner table; the uncertain future for Singapore’s lighthouses; coping with loneliness and self-harm through muay thai; taxi driver looking for the owner of a S$120,000 Rolex found in her cab; Loh Kean Yew’s loss at the Singapore Badminton Open final; and as durians fruit on public land along Lorong Lew Lian, a reminder that you’re not allowed to pick them.
Below are the issues we explore in depth:
International: Shangri-Lapsed?
It’s a remarkable thing to pooh-pooh one of the world’s leading defence gabfests at said gabfest. But we live in remarkable times. At the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, Pete Hegseth, US secretary of war (gag) and former talk-show host, dismissed talking as a way out of international entanglements even as he talked about how recent talks between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping have yielded a wobbly détente between the US and China. “Less Shangri-La, more ships, more subs” he tub-thumped while wishing “my counterpart was here”. Had Dong Jun, Chinese defence minister, been there, he would have been none too pleased at Hegseth’s reference to China’s “historic military build-up” and his demand for all allies to spend 3.5 percent of their GDP on defence—similar to what the US itself spends.
“Increasing defence budgets will inevitably play into Beijing’s claims that it is being encircled and that Chinese military objectives are purely defensive,” wrote one observer. And yet, Hegseth was more measured this year. For instance, he didn’t even mention Chinese designs on Taiwan, a centrepiece of his 2025 speech. Taiwan itself did not make it to the list of Asian nations who had their hair affectionately tousled for increasing their defence expenditures. The omission must have set Taiwanese hearts aflutter, coming as it did on the back of a US pause on a US$14bn (S$17.9bn) arms sale to their seemingly imperilled nation.
What are we in South-east Asia to make of all this? For realists, Hegseth’s transactional straight-talk is a refreshing change from the burlesque that passes for global diplomacy. His insistence that all nations pay their way to security is a “clear-eyed admission that many countries in the Indo-Pacific will forge their own pathways and choose cooperation based on mutual benefit,” declared The Straits Times (ST). Meanwhile, local mandarin Bilahari Kausikan felt that Hegseth’s frequent allusions to the US as a Pacific power should reassure all that it won’t decamp from the region.
Hegseth’s muscular, prickly posture was in stark contrast to the conciliatory keynote delivered by To Lam, Vietnam’s president, highlighting the “widening gap” between the US and South-east Asian approaches to regional security. To Lam stressed talks and dialogues, and the importance of hewing to the rules-based framework underpinning the post-world war two global order. One leading regional think tank headlined its analysis: “At Shangri-La, Washington and Southeast Asia talked past one another”. For pessimists, the increasingly vicious fickleness of US foreign policy; its proclivity for trade and military wars; its hopelessly corrupt administration that has turned the ship of state into a pirate vessel are all omens that this particular superpower cannot be taken at its word.
The other one didn’t even deign to properly show up. In the absence of its seniormost defence personnel, China was represented by dutifully nationalistic academics and researchers. Chan Chun Sing, Singapore’s minister for defence, smilingly admonished those describing this bevy as “low-level Chinese participation…I don’t think you like people to call you low-level.” Which is all cutely egalitarian, but in the symbolism-soaked diplomatic world, it’s perhaps (China has sent “not high level” attendees before) an indication that such multilateral fora do not befit its stature, especially when they’re suspected of being soapboxes for US talking points. Indeed, China may be preparing to clamber atop its own, if its pushing of the Xianghsan forum as an alternative is any indication. Hegseth may get his less “Shangri-La” after all.
Politics: One smouldering Raeesah
Shangri-La in Orchard, and an inferno in Geylang. Almost five years after Raeesah Khan, then MP with the Workers’ Party (WP), lied in Parliament, Pritam Singh, WP secretary-general, is still dealing with the fallout. This week, somebody leaked a notice to CNA about a special cadres conference on June 28th, “arising from a requisition from 25 cadre members”, or about a quarter of the (reported) 100 total. Their ultimatum to Singh: offer to step down as party chief or face a secret vote. Eugene Tan, associate professor of law at SMU, called it the “first overt challenge—to the Pritam Singh-led WP leadership”.
