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The risks of US and China talking past each other
The verbal sparring over talks at the Shangri-La Dialogue point to the difficulty of setting up ‘guardrails’ in the Sino-US relationship.
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US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin (left) and China Defence Minister Li Shangfu speaking during different sessions at the Shangri-La Dialogue.
ST PHOTOS: MARK CHEONG
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“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.
