US Asian Defense

Cheap talk may be more valuable than you think

Updated 5 June 2025

You’d be forgiven for thinking that a get-together called the Shangri-La Dialogue was something our willowy blonde earth-mother, Gwyneth Paltrow, came up with while tanning her… ehem… bits. The truth is a bit more bareknuckle and a lot less fashionable: It’s the premier annual Asian defense conference, put together by very sensible people at the International Institute Strategic Studies (IISS) generals, leaders, defense wonks and academics at Singapore’s very fashionable Shangri-La Hotel to discuss how to kill each other and why that might ultimately be a bad idea.

You’d also be forgiven for thinking that these conferences and meetings that continually use “dialogue” as a verb doesn’t serve much of a purpose. It does seem like a lot of mental masturbation, but on that note, remember that the unofficial motto of Harvard Business School is “Network or die!” While most HBS sorts are insufferable, you have to admit that they get a lot done. In an age of unilateral transactions over relationships, do all the glad-handing, forums and break-outs really matter? Probably more than you think.

 It’s a Who’s Who of players claiming some interest in the area of the world called the Indo-Pacific - the definition of which changes depending on who is claiming interest. English speakers and South Americans think of it as the Pacific Rim and the Indian Ocean. China thinks it means anything China says it does, and doesn’t really care how anyone else defines it. To underscore that point, Beijing sent analysts scrambling to decipher why region Big Man skipped the conference altogether. One interpetation was that Beijing was ceding diplomatic space to Washington. Well, I’ve never shared a cigarette with President Xi, but that doesn’t sound right. My assessment is simpler, in fact, it borders on the obvious:

1. It was a power move that told the Pacific world that Big Panda didn’t give damn what the rest of the region had to say, and...

   
   

2. the whole thing was shaping up to be an anti-China pile-on, and who wants to sit through that?

They weren’t wrong, at the opening keynote address, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that if China doesn’t want a NATO presence in the Pacific, it needs to get North Korean troops out of Europe. Fair enough, but what (you’ll be forgiven…) has France got to do with it? Paris cites a few islands it managed to hold onto when its empire imploded to call itself a pacific power. Although he had to admit that “it is most of the time forgotten.”  Yes, Emmanuel, yes it is.

It also has a very French definition of the region: it extends from the west coast of the America’s to the east coast of Africa. Although you’d be hard pressed to find a Tanzanian who thinks they’re involved in any way, shape or form.  You’ll have to take it up with the good people at the IISS how that landed him as keynote speaker. Maybe they felt bad after his wife tried to shove his face off a plane in Vietnam. Not being a colony the French managed to hold onto, I understand the Vietnamese found hilarious.

The predictably nuanced speech by Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani who didn’t mention Japan’s over-bearing neighbor (but absolutely did) while fretting over cyberattacks and “grey-zone tactics” like tearing up undersea cables that are an increasingly popular maneuver in the conflict playbook. It’s the way these things unfold because they do have something of a Harvard Business School alumni mixer vibe. There was a lot more throwing shade than outright finger pointing from ambitious, sensible sorts tasked with making complex deals and sensitive arrangements under real-world conditions. And US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was there. With his hair gel and tattoos, he looked and sounded like Guy Fieri accidentally stumbled into the card room at New Orlean’s Boston Club.

Hegseth pointed fingers. “We are here to stay. As a matter of fact, we are here this morning, and somebody else is not.” He went on to point out “the threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent”. Traditionally, this is where Washington starts to drone on about abstracts like freedom and democracy, but Hegseth sounded like a goon running a protection racket, suggesting America’s Pacific allies pay up for US defense. Which, if recent history is any guide, may or may not be forthcoming.

After the conference wrapped-up and everyone flew home, Chinese state media revealed detalis of its new DF-5 intercontinental ballistic missle. Beijing is generally low-key on its ability to burn down the neighborhood, but the timing is telling. In response to Hegseth's pionting a China as the threat, the response seems to be “you’re damned right we are.”

Will any of this dialogue make a bit of difference? It’s hard to say. US foreign policy may be awful, but Chinese foreign policy is even worse, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it. They resent America, but they fear China. Which is worse depends a lot on mood, but the rule of thumb is here is pretty simple: When caught between a rock and a hard place - try to make a buck.

Whatever else is happening, China and the US have moved from anything a sane person would call strategic competition to new cold war rivalry. And least we hope that it stays cold. Superpowers, being superpowers, don’t have to negotiate much, so they aren’t very good at it. They need intermediaries, smaller perhaps, certainly wilier, and caught in the cross-hairs. The Shangri-La Dialogue and rules-based clubs like the UN may turn out to be, like layers of middle management, something that appears fairly pointless until you get rid of them. Then you realize how much volatility they absorbed with the endless talk and dull, slow moving stability.

Call it security by boredom. Faced with an intractable largely emotional problem, the system doesn’t so much lead to a good solution as it avoids a bad one all together. It’s a concept most of us are familiar with even if we haven’t put a name to it. Like when your father looked at you and said, slowly and deliberately, “I’ll have to think about that…” You couldn’t argue with the answer, even if you both knew it was no. On the off-chance you ever got a straight answer from the man, the opportunity to drive your car into a lake had passed.

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