Shangri-La Dialogue: False dichotomies, real consequences

In James Hilton’s famous 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, Shangri-La is a hidden paradise in the Himalayas where people go to escape the chaos of the world. It is a place of total solitude and peace.

But if you walk into the Shangri-La hotel in Singapore during the annual security summit, you will find the exact opposite. It is loud, crowded, and packed with defence ministers, generals and senior officials grappling with a world where global peace is rapidly fracturing.

For the regulars who attend every year, this shindig is a giant barometer for global anxiety; 2026 was no different. The shift in tone – for the better – between the US and China was clear for all to see and carried implications for countries large and small. From those who believed that they could hide behind the US shield, to those who believed in the need to choose sides, everyone had to recalibrate their calculus.

There is an old saying that when elephants fight, the grass suffers. But smaller nations are realising a harsher truth today: even when elephants make love, the grass is not spared. No one wants to be the grass.

The security paradox

To keep from getting trampled, countries are rushing to buy weapons and build up their militaries. But this creates a tricky problem that works a lot like Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When you boost your defence budget to feel safe, your neighbour panics and buys more weapons too. Suddenly, everyone feels less secure than before.

Building a real military cannot be done overnight, nor through a feast and famine strategy. Even as one spends more on defence, one must have the absorptive capacity to translate expenditure into capabilities, rather than just price inflation. The key is the consistency required to build up the military talent pool, the technical competencies, and the military industrial system. The truth is that public support for defence expenditure will be subject to the vagaries of politics, the impatience of the electorate and the tyranny of the other urgent national priorities like social spending in times of disruption.

Three traps we need to avoid

In this context, and through the many conversations I had with fellow defence ministers over the Shangri-La weekend, there are three false dichotomies that have emerged which we must pay attention to.

First, choosing between talking and arming. Some people think you are either a peacemaker who loves dialogue, or a hawk who loves big guns. This is a false choice. Dialogue without a real military behind it has zero credibility. But building up a massive military without talking to your neighbours is just begging for an accidental war. We need both.

Second, treating everything in transactional terms and disregarding rules. It is easy to get frustrated with our imperfect international rules, and it is tempting for countries to only follow the rules only when they favour them. But if we throw out the rulebook completely, we lose all predictability. Without shared rules, nations resort to cut-throat, “beggar-thy-neighbour” policies where everyone ultimately loses.

Third, only focusing on today’s fires and forgetting tomorrow’s challenges. Because political cycles are getting shorter, politicians are tempted to look only at what is exploding right now. They claim that debating long-term threats like cyber warfare or critical infrastructure protection is a waste of time. But smart firefighters do not just put out active fires – they also work on fire prevention. If we look only at the short term, we will constantly be overwhelmed by the next disaster. Never let the urgent completely crowd out the important.

The power of keeping quiet

The public part of the Shangri-La Dialogue is mostly theatre, sometimes filled with rigid speeches and political chest-thumping meant for the news cameras back home. But the real magic happens away from the media glare, during closed-door ministerial luncheons and private meetings.

When you strip away the public posturing, defence ministers quickly realise they are all dealing with the exact same headaches. We all struggle to convince voters to fund the military, recruit tech talent, and wrestle with rigid bureaucracies that baulk at new technology.

In defence diplomacy, a successful meeting is usually one that stays completely out of the news. Success means quietly stopping a crisis before it even starts.

Ultimately, the contrast between fiction and reality is stark. In the famous story, people travelled to Shangri-La looking for solitude – a way to escape the rest of humanity.

But in the real world, leaders pack into the Shangri-La Dialogue looking for solidarity. They come to build strategic trust, develop partnerships, and do the heavy lifting required to keep the peace. It takes immense, unglamorous work to stay off the front page, and that is perhaps why they keep coming back.