“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again,” the British author William Edward Hickson famously urged his readers in a poem he wrote almost two centuries ago.

The organisers of the recently concluded Shangri-La Dialogue must surely agree with this sentiment. For although they did not succeed in getting the defence ministers of the United States and China to use the Singapore get-together as a venue for the launch of serious bilateral security talks between the world’s most powerful military forces, future Singapore-based dialogues will undoubtedly pursue the same objective.