Document Code: SG-F-28 Full Title: Lawrence Wong's Foreign Policy Doctrine — Continuity, Recalibration, and the Post-LHL Era Coverage Period: 2024–2026 Level Designation: Level 2 (Block F - Foreign Policy) Version Date: 2026-10-09

Primary Sources Consulted:

Lawrence Wong, inaugural address as Prime Minister, 15 May 2024
Lawrence Wong, National Day Rally 2024 (PMO text); video message on the implications of the US tariffs, 4 April 2025; S Rajaratnam Lecture, 16 April 2025 (PMO text); keynote at the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference, March 2026; attendance at the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting (Lima) and the G20 Leaders' Summit (Rio de Janeiro), November 2024, and ASEAN Summits (2024, 2025). (Singapore's statement at the 79th UN General Assembly General Debate, 28 September 2024, was delivered by Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, not by Wong; no Wong address at the Shangri-La Dialogue 2024 or 2025 has been located.)
Vivian Balakrishnan, ministerial statements and speeches as Minister for Foreign Affairs (2024–2026)
Parliament of Singapore, Hansard records: foreign policy debates and ministerial statements (2024–2025)
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Singapore, press statements on bilateral relations, multilateral engagements, and regional developments (2024–2026)
Bilahari Kausikan, Singapore Is Not an Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2017)
Bilahari Kausikan, columns and public lectures on US-China competition and Singapore's positioning (2024–2026)
Prime Minister's Office Singapore, "PM Lawrence Wong at the S Rajaratnam Lecture 2025," 16 April 2025 (organised by the MFA Diplomatic Academy)
Lee Hsien Loong, farewell addresses and transition speeches on foreign policy continuity (2024)
IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies), Shangri-La Dialogue proceedings (2024–2025)
ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, The State of Southeast Asia Survey (2024, 2025, 2026)
Ministry of Trade and Industry, bilateral trade and investment data, FTA status reports (2024–2026)
Ministry of Defence, bilateral defence cooperation agreements and exercise schedules (2024–2026)
The Straits Times, Business Times, and Channel NewsAsia, contemporaneous foreign policy coverage (2024–2026)
Forward Singapore Report, Building Our Shared Future, October 2023
IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2026 (23rd Asia Security Summit, Singapore, 29–31 May 2026), plenary session proceedings, including Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing's remarks at the 6th Plenary Session, 31 May 2026
Prime Minister's Office Singapore and Ministry of Foreign Affairs Singapore, press statements on PM Wong's attendance at the ASEAN-Russia Commemorative Summit, Kazan, 17–18 June 2026, and his meeting with President Erdoğan of Türkiye, Istanbul, 19 June 2026, including MFA Singapore, "Visit by PM Lawrence Wong to attend the ASEAN-Russia Commemorative Summit in Kazan, Russia, 18 June 2026" (consulted 2026-10-09)
Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore, announcement of the Singapore Economic Resilience Taskforce (SERT), 8 April 2025 (as anchored in SG-O-02)

Related Documents:

SG-F-01 | Foundations of Foreign Policy
SG-F-02 | Singapore and the United States
SG-F-03 | Singapore and China
SG-F-04 | The Malaysia Relationship
SG-F-05 | The Indonesia Relationship
SG-F-14 | Singapore and Israel
SG-F-22 | Cybersecurity
SG-F-27 | Singapore and the Iran-Israel-US War
SG-F-30 | Singapore-Malaysia Relations
SG-F-31 | Singapore-Indonesia Relations
SG-F-32 | Singapore-Australia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership
SG-F-33 | Singapore-India Relations
SG-F-38 | Singapore-France-Germany Relations
SG-F-46 | Singapore-Russia Relations
SG-L-37 | Lawrence Wong Speech Anthology
SG-O-02 | Trump Tariffs and Singapore
SG-B-09 | Lawrence Wong Transition
SG-K-34 | General Election 2025
SG-N-01 | International Perceptions
SG-O-03 | Geopolitical Mega Trends
SG-O-09 | Geopolitical Realignment — ASEAN in Flux

1. Key Takeaways

Lawrence Wong inherited a foreign policy architecture of exceptional coherence, built over six decades by Lee Kuan Yew, Rajaratnam, and their successors, and his primary task has been to signal continuity while recalibrating for a geopolitical environment that is materially more dangerous than the one Lee Hsien Loong navigated. Wong's public statements since taking office on 15 May 2024 have consistently emphasised the durability of Singapore's core foreign policy principles — sovereignty, non-alignment, the primacy of international law, and the centrality of ASEAN — while introducing subtle shifts in tone, emphasis, and institutional priority that reflect his reading of the changed strategic landscape.
The US-China strategic competition has intensified beyond what any previous Singapore leader has faced, and Wong's balancing act is correspondingly more difficult. Trump's return to the presidency in January 2025 — with reciprocal tariffs, transactional bilateralism, and scepticism toward multilateral institutions — disrupted the rules-based order that Singapore has treated as existential infrastructure. Simultaneously, China's military assertiveness in the South China Sea, its economic coercion of smaller states, and its technological rivalry with the US have narrowed the space for equidistance. Wong's approach has been to deepen bilateral relationships with both powers while investing heavily in alternative partnerships — India, the EU, Japan, Australia, the Gulf states — to reduce dependence on either.
Wong has adopted a notably different rhetorical register from Lee Hsien Loong on foreign policy. Where Lee spoke with the authority of a leader whose father founded the nation and whose personal relationships with Xi Jinping and successive US presidents were unique diplomatic assets, Wong speaks as a technocrat-leader who must build credibility through institutional competence rather than personal stature. His speeches are more explicitly anchored in economic data, multilateral frameworks, and institutional mechanisms than in the personal diplomacy that characterised the Lee era. This shift reflects both Wong's temperament and the structural reality that a fourth-generation leader cannot rely on the relational capital accumulated by his predecessors.
The bilateral relationship with Malaysia under Anwar Ibrahim has been Wong's most productive early diplomatic achievement. The Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone (JS-SEZ), set in motion by an MOU signed on 11 January 2024 and formalised by the JS-SEZ Agreement signed at the 11th Leaders' Retreat in Putrajaya on 7 January 2025, represents the most ambitious bilateral economic initiative since the failed High-Speed Rail project. The RTS Link (Johor Bahru-Singapore rail connection, targeted to begin passenger service at the end of 2026) and a constructive tone on long-standing irritants — airspace management and water among them, though neither has been resolved — suggest a bilateral relationship in an unusually constructive phase.
Wong has elevated the "Global South" dimension of Singapore's foreign policy in ways that his predecessors did not. His attendance at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro (November 2024, as an invited guest), the new MFA Development Partnership Unit and expanded capacity-building for Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Pacific announced in his 16 April 2025 S Rajaratnam Lecture, and his emphasis on development partnership signal a strategic pivot toward emerging economies that are gaining geopolitical weight. This pivot reflects both Singapore's own development experience and strategic calculation (diversifying partnerships reduces vulnerability to great power pressure).
Trump's tariff regime and the Hormuz crisis have stress-tested Wong's foreign policy in real time. The tariff shock (10% baseline tariff on Singapore exports to the US, announced 2 April 2025) drew Wong's 4 April 2025 video message declaring that "the era of rules-based globalisation and free trade is over", a decision not to retaliate, and the creation of the Singapore Economic Resilience Taskforce under DPM Gan Kim Yong. The Strait of Hormuz crisis — which began with US-Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February 2026 and Iran's declared closure of the Strait on 2 March 2026 (SG-F-27) — tested Singapore's international-law-first positioning, with Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan stating in Parliament on 7 April 2026 that Singapore would not negotiate over passage through an international strait.
ASEAN centrality remains the rhetorical cornerstone of Wong's foreign policy, but the practical content of that commitment is being tested by ASEAN's continued inability to address the Myanmar crisis, the South China Sea disputes, and internal divisions over US-China alignment. Wong has maintained Singapore's position as ASEAN's most vocal advocate for institutional coherence while quietly deepening bilateral partnerships with the members of the Quad and AUKUS — the Australia CSP 2.0 (October 2025), the India Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (September 2024), and ties with Japan, the UK and the US — that hedge against ASEAN's institutional limitations. Singapore is not a member of the Quad or of AUKUS.

2. The Inheritance: What Wong Received (May 2024)

When Lawrence Wong assumed the premiership on 15 May 2024, he inherited a foreign policy position that was simultaneously strong and strained. Strong because Singapore's diplomatic infrastructure — its global network of embassies, its reputation for reliability and competence, its hosting of the Shangri-La Dialogue, its FTA network covering 27 trading partners — was the product of six decades of sustained investment. Strained because the geopolitical environment had deteriorated significantly during Lee Hsien Loong's final years in office.

The US-China relationship, which Lee had navigated with exceptional personal skill — maintaining close ties with Xi Jinping while hosting US military assets and supporting the US alliance architecture — had moved from strategic competition to something approaching strategic hostility. The Ukraine war (February 2022–present) had forced Singapore to impose sanctions on Russia, a decision that was principled but that complicated Singapore's relationships with countries — India, the Gulf states, much of Africa — that had not joined the Western sanctions coalition. The Hamas-Israel conflict (October 2023–present) and its expansion into a regional confrontation involving Iran had created new diplomatic minefields in the Middle East, where Singapore maintained relationships with both Israel and the Arab states.

ASEAN, the multilateral framework that Singapore has treated as the cornerstone of its regional diplomacy since 1967, was in institutional crisis. The Myanmar junta's defiance of ASEAN's Five-Point Consensus, Cambodia's and Thailand's inconsistent engagement with the consensus, and the growing divergence between ASEAN's maritime states (which face China directly in the South China Sea) and its mainland states (which are drawn into China's economic orbit through the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation framework) had weakened ASEAN centrality to the point where serious analysts questioned whether it retained substantive meaning.

Lee Hsien Loong's parting gift to Wong was a series of relationships that were in good condition: the bilateral relationship with the US was strong (underscored by new cooperation on critical and emerging technology launched in 2023 ), the China relationship was stable (Lee's last visit to China as Prime Minister was in 2023, when he met Xi Jinping), and the Malaysia relationship had been reset by Anwar Ibrahim's election in November 2022. But these relationships were personal as well as institutional, and the question Wong faced was whether they would survive the transition from a leader with three decades of international relationships to one who was largely unknown on the global stage.

3. Wong's Rhetorical Framework: Principled Pragmatism 2.0

Wong's foreign policy rhetoric, analysed across his first two years in office, reveals a distinctive approach that preserves the substance of Singapore's traditional positions while adjusting the tone and emphasis for a new era.

The continuity is explicit and deliberate. Wong's fullest foreign policy statement to date is the S Rajaratnam Lecture of 16 April 2025, organised by the MFA Diplomatic Academy. (Neither a Shangri-La Dialogue keynote by Wong in June 2024 nor a UN General Assembly address by him in September 2024 took place. The SLD 2024 keynote was given by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who called on Wong at the Istana on 31 May 2024, and Singapore's UNGA 79 General Debate statement was delivered by Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan.) The lecture invoked Rajaratnam's 1972 vision of Singapore as a global city, warned that the rules-based order was weakening and that US-China rivalry was fragmenting the global economy, and insisted that "despite our limitations as a small state, we cannot afford to be a passive bystander in this evolving landscape" and that "Singapore today is not without agency". It restated the core principles — the sovereignty of small states, the primacy of international law, ASEAN centrality, and refusal to be forced to choose sides — that are unchanged from Lee Kuan Yew's era, and promised that "Singapore will continue to be a safe harbour, a global emporium, and a trusted hub for all sides to engage" (verbatim per the PMO text, as verified in SG-L-37).

The adjustments are in register and emphasis. Three shifts are discernible:

First, Wong frames foreign policy challenges in explicitly economic and institutional terms rather than in the realist power-politics language that Lee Kuan Yew and Bilahari Kausikan favoured. Where Lee Kuan Yew spoke of "hard truths" and the "jungle" of international politics, and where Bilahari wrote of great power competition in unsparing geopolitical terms, Wong speaks of "supply chain resilience," "digital connectivity," "economic diversification," and "institutional frameworks." This reflects both his technocratic background (he was a civil servant who began as an economist at MTI in 1997 and later served at MOF, among other postings, before entering politics) and a calculated judgment that Singapore's foreign policy audience — ASEAN neighbours, Global South partners, multilateral institutions — responds better to the language of shared prosperity than to the language of power balancing.

Second, Wong has been more explicit than his predecessors in presenting Singapore's development experience as something to share. His foreign policy statements emphasise Singapore's development experience as a resource for others — the Singapore Cooperation Programme, technical assistance in urban planning and governance, climate adaptation expertise — rather than as a badge of superiority. This "Global South solidarity" framing is partly instrumental (it builds relationships with countries that are gaining geopolitical weight) and partly sincere (Wong's own background — by his account a solidly middle-class family, his father a sales executive and his mother a teacher (SG-H-PM-04) — reads differently on development themes from that of Lee Hsien Loong, the son of the founding prime minister).

Third, Wong has elevated resilience as a foreign policy concept. Where previous leaders spoke of deterrence (military), balance (diplomatic), and competitiveness (economic), Wong has added resilience — the capacity to absorb shocks and recover from disruptions — as a unifying framework. His National Day Rally 2024 address named "the intensifying rivalry between America and China" as the biggest geopolitical concern and warned that "As a small country, totally reliant on trade and a stable global environment, we are bound to be impacted" (PMO text; neither "shock-proof" nor "compounding disruptions" appears in the speech). His foreign policy has operationalised this resilience framing through supply chain diversification, energy security initiatives, food security investment, and the deepening of alternative trade partnerships.

4. The US Relationship Under Trump 2.0

The return of Donald Trump to the US presidency in January 2025 was the single most disruptive event in Singapore's external environment during Wong's first two years. Trump's "America First" agenda — reciprocal tariffs, scepticism toward alliances, transactional bilateralism, and the subordination of multilateral institutions to US domestic interests — challenged every pillar of Singapore's foreign policy.

The tariff shock hit Singapore directly. On 2 April 2025, the Trump administration announced reciprocal tariffs including a 10% baseline rate on Singapore exports, overturning a trade relationship that had operated under the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (USSFTA, signed 2003) with negligible tariff barriers. While Singapore's direct export exposure to the US was manageable , the indirect effects were more consequential. Singapore's role as a regional trading hub meant that tariff-driven disruptions to supply chains across ASEAN would cascade through Singaporean logistics, finance, and professional services. The uncertainty itself was damaging: business investment decisions depend on predictable trade rules, and Trump's tariff regime introduced a level of unpredictability that Singapore's open economy was structurally ill-equipped to absorb.

Wong's response was calibrated across three dimensions. Diplomatic engagement: Singapore engaged Washington on the bilateral relationship in terms the administration valued — defence cooperation (Singapore has hosted US military assets, including past rotational deployments of littoral combat ships at Changi Naval Base), investment (Singapore is a significant foreign investor in the US), and counter-terrorism cooperation . Economic mitigation: Wong announced in his 4 April 2025 video message that Singapore would not impose retaliatory tariffs, and the government set up the Singapore Economic Resilience Taskforce (SERT) under DPM Gan Kim Yong to support affected firms and workers (SG-O-02), while accelerating trade diversification through RCEP implementation and other agreements. Multilateral advocacy: Singapore used its positions in the WTO, APEC, and ASEAN to advocate for the preservation of rules-based trade, while pragmatically acknowledging that the rules-based order was under unprecedented strain.

The defence dimension of the US relationship remained robust under Trump 2.0, reflecting the bipartisan US consensus on the strategic importance of the Indo-Pacific. Singapore continued to host US military assets, participate in exercises with US forces (including the bilateral CARAT series and the multilateral, Thailand-hosted Cobra Gold), and support the US naval presence in the region. The 1990 MOU on US access to Singapore's facilities, renewed in 2019 (SG-F-02), remained in force without controversy. Wong's challenge was to insulate the defence relationship from the turbulence in the trade relationship — a compartmentalisation that Singapore's diplomats managed with characteristic skill but that remained vulnerable to Trump's tendency to link unrelated issues.

The broader strategic implication of Trump 2.0 for Singapore was the acceleration of a trend that had begun under Trump's first term and continued under Biden: the erosion of the US commitment to the multilateral, rules-based international order that Singapore has treated as existential infrastructure. Singapore's foreign policy since independence has been premised on the existence of international rules that constrain the behaviour of large states toward small ones. When the largest guarantor of that order becomes its most prominent violator — through tariff unilateralism, withdrawal from multilateral agreements, and transactional diplomacy — Singapore's strategic foundation is weakened. Wong's response has been to invest in alternative multilateral frameworks (RCEP, CPTPP, the ASEAN-EU relationship) while maintaining the US bilateral relationship as a hedge against Chinese dominance. It is a strategy of redundancy rather than reliance.

5. The China Challenge: Managing the Indispensable Relationship

China remains Singapore's largest trading partner, the most important external variable in Singapore's strategic environment, and the relationship that demands the most diplomatic bandwidth. Wong's approach to China has been to maintain the warmth of the relationship while being clearer — in private if not always in public — about Singapore's red lines.

The bilateral economic relationship deepened under Wong. Two-way trade remained the largest of any Singapore partner , Chinese investment in Singapore's technology and financial sectors continued to grow, and the Chongqing Connectivity Initiative (CCI) — the third government-to-government project following Suzhou Industrial Park and Tianjin Eco-City — continued to develop, including its trade-corridor and digital connectivity components . Singapore remained the largest foreign investor in China among ASEAN states, and Chinese companies continued to use Singapore as their regional headquarters for Southeast Asian operations.

The strategic tensions, however, were equally persistent. China's military activities in the South China Sea — including the harassment of Philippine vessels at Second Thomas Shoal, the expansion of artificial island infrastructure, and increased naval patrols near the Spratly and Paracel chains — created a security environment that directly threatened Singapore's core interest in freedom of navigation. Wong maintained Singapore's position: not a claimant state, but a vocal advocate for the 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling, UNCLOS, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. This position continued to draw quiet displeasure from Beijing, which regarded Singapore's principled stance as unhelpfully aligned with the US position.

The Terrex incident of 2016 — when Hong Kong authorities impounded nine SAF armoured vehicles being shipped from Taiwan — remained a background factor in the relationship, a reminder that Beijing was willing to use coercive leverage when Singapore's actions crossed Chinese red lines. Wong's team carefully managed the Taiwan dimension of Singapore's foreign policy, continuing the SAF's long-standing training arrangements with Taiwan while ensuring that these arrangements remained discreet and non-provocative.

A continuing strand of the China relationship is the deepening of Singapore's economic engagement with Chinese provinces beyond the traditional Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta focus, through the western-China connectivity of the CCI and city-level partnerships such as the Shenzhen smart-city cooperation . This reflects a strategic calculus that broadening Singapore's economic footprint within China would create more stakeholders in the bilateral relationship and reduce the risk that a single political dispute could disrupt the economic dimension.

6. The Neighbourhood: Malaysia, Indonesia, and the ASEAN Core

Wong's most notable early foreign policy success was in the neighbourhood — specifically, the bilateral relationships with Malaysia and Indonesia that Singapore's leaders have always regarded as the most consequential, and the most difficult, of all external relationships.

Malaysia under Anwar Ibrahim. The Anwar-Wong relationship has been the most productive Malaysia-Singapore bilateral dynamic since the early years of Abdullah Badawi's premiership (2003–2009). The centrepiece is the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone (JS-SEZ), launched by an MOU signed at the Leaders' Retreat in Putrajaya on 11 January 2024 (under Lee Hsien Loong) and formalised by the JS-SEZ Agreement signed at the 11th Malaysia-Singapore Leaders' Retreat in Putrajaya on 7 January 2025, Wong's first retreat as Prime Minister (SG-F-30). The JS-SEZ establishes a framework for integrated economic development across the Johor-Singapore border, with provisions for simplified cross-border movement of goods and people, harmonised regulatory standards in designated sectors, and joint investment promotion. If fully implemented, the JS-SEZ would represent a structural deepening of bilateral economic integration that goes beyond any previous arrangement.

The RTS Link — the Johor Bahru-Singapore rail connection linking Bukit Chagar to Woodlands North — remained targeted to begin passenger service at the end of 2026, providing a physical infrastructure backbone for the SEZ. Wong and Anwar also advanced discussions on the long-dormant airspace issue (Malaysian aviation authorities' management of airspace over southern Johor that affects Singapore approaches) and on the price of water under the 1962 Water Agreement, which expires in 2061 but which Malaysia periodically raises as a grievance. Neither issue was resolved, but the tone of discussion was constructive rather than confrontational.

The fragility of the Malaysia relationship should not be understated. Anwar's political position in Malaysia is secure but not unchallenged, and Malaysian domestic politics has historically produced periodic anti-Singapore sentiment that constrains bilateral cooperation regardless of leaders' personal rapport. The cancellation of the Kuala Lumpur-Singapore High-Speed Rail in 2021, after years of bilateral negotiation and Malaysian political oscillation, remains a cautionary precedent.

Indonesia under Prabowo Subianto. Prabowo's election as Indonesia's president in February 2024 and his inauguration in October 2024 introduced uncertainty into a bilateral relationship that had been managed carefully under Joko Widodo. Prabowo's background as a former military commander with a controversial human rights record, his more nationalistic economic orientation, and his initial foreign policy signals — including overtures to both the US and China, and a more assertive stance on ASEAN leadership — created a different counterpart for Singapore's diplomacy.

Wong moved quickly to establish a personal relationship with Prabowo, making an introductory visit to Jakarta on 5–6 November 2024 and hosting Prabowo for the 8th Singapore-Indonesia Leaders' Retreat in Singapore on 16 June 2025, where a package of bilateral agreements — including green-economy MOUs on cross-border electricity trade and carbon capture and storage — was exchanged (SG-F-31). The bilateral agenda focused on economic cooperation (including the Batam-Bintan-Karimun zones, the Indonesian counterpart to Johor's role in Singapore's hinterland), defence cooperation (operating under the Defence Cooperation Agreement renegotiated in the 2022 Framework Agreement concluded by Lee Hsien Loong and Joko Widodo, not a Wong-era renewal), and maritime security in the Singapore Strait. The relationship was productive but lacked the depth of the Anwar-Wong dynamic, reflecting both the early stage of the Prabowo relationship and the structural asymmetries (Indonesia's population is 50 times Singapore's) that make the bilateral relationship inherently more complex than the Malaysia one.

7. The Global South Pivot and Multilateral Strategy

Wong's most distinctive foreign policy contribution — the dimension that most clearly differentiates his approach from his predecessors — is the elevation of Global South engagement from a secondary track to a strategic priority.

Previous Singapore leaders engaged with developing countries primarily through the Singapore Cooperation Programme (SCP), which has trained over 150,000 officials from developing countries since 1992, and through multilateral institutions (the UN, the Commonwealth, the Non-Aligned Movement). But the engagement was pragmatic rather than strategic — Singapore participated in Global South forums as a matter of diplomatic courtesy rather than as a core element of its foreign policy architecture.

Wong has shifted this calculus. His 16 April 2025 S Rajaratnam Lecture announced a new Development Partnership Unit in MFA and more capacity-building for Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Pacific, alongside continued support for multilateral institutions, including Singapore's candidate for the International Court of Justice. (No February 2025 ISEAS speech by Wong calling the Global South "no longer a residual category but the dynamic centre of the global economy" has been located.) The underlying reasoning is that the economic weight of emerging economies is rising. India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are building economic weight that will reshape global governance within a decade. Singapore's traditional partnerships — the US, China, Japan, the EU — remain essential, but a foreign policy that relies exclusively on relationships with established powers is increasingly incomplete.

The operationalisation of this pivot includes several initiatives. First, enhanced bilateral engagement with India: the relationship was elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's official visit to Singapore on 4–5 September 2024, and a CSP Roadmap was adopted during Wong's official visit to India on 2–4 September 2025 (SG-F-33). Indian government statistics put bilateral trade at about US$35.6 billion in FY2023–24 and US$34.3 billion in FY2024–25, making Singapore India's largest ASEAN trading partner. (Neither a Wong quotation calling India "the relationship with the greatest unrealised potential" nor a "2024 upgrade of the CECA" has been confirmed.) Second, engagement with the Gulf states — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — on sovereign wealth fund cooperation, clean energy investment, and technology transfer. Third, participation in wider forums, including Wong's attendance as an invited guest at the G20 Leaders' Summit in Rio de Janeiro (November 2024), on whose sidelines he and Chancellor Olaf Scholz signed the Germany-Singapore Strategic Partnership declaration on 18 November 2024 (SG-F-38).

The multilateral dimension of Wong's strategy reflects a pragmatic hedging approach. Singapore continues to advocate for the WTO, the UN system, and the ASEAN-centred regional architecture. But Wong has simultaneously invested in plurilateral and minilateral frameworks — RCEP, CPTPP, the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA), and the CPTPP-EU link proposed in the 2025 Rajaratnam Lecture — that provide functional cooperation on specific issues without depending on the consensus-based decision-making that paralyses larger multilateral bodies. This "variable geometry" approach to multilateralism — engaging in different groupings for different purposes — represents an evolution from Singapore's traditional preference for universal multilateral frameworks. Wong made the case for such plurilateral arrangements directly in his Opening Plenary keynote at the Boao Forum for Asia in March 2026 (SG-L-37) .

8. Defence Diplomacy and Security Partnerships

Wong's foreign policy has maintained and expanded the web of defence relationships that Singapore has built over decades — relationships that provide security depth for a country with no strategic hinterland and a military that, however capable, cannot deter great power coercion alone.

The key bilateral defence partnerships remain the anchors. The US relationship, centred on the 1990 MOU (renewed and expanded multiple times) that provides US forces with access to Changi Naval Base and Paya Lebar Airbase, continued without disruption under Trump 2.0. Singapore's defence purchases from US manufacturers, including the F-35 programme , participation in bilateral exercises, and counter-terrorism intelligence sharing reinforced the operational partnership. Australia's defence relationship deepened through the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership 2.0, declared by the two Prime Ministers in Canberra on 8 October 2025 (covering 2025–2035), together with an MOU on Enhanced Defence Cooperation signed the same day by Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing and Richard Marles; the long-running SAF training arrangements in Queensland, under the 2016 training MOU and its successor treaty, remained the operational core (SG-F-32). The India defence relationship, which had grown significantly under Modi and Lee, continued to expand under Wong — with joint naval exercises in the Andaman Sea and technology cooperation in unmanned systems and AI-enabled surveillance.

The Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) — the 1971 framework linking Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK — experienced a renaissance under Wong. The FPDA, often dismissed as a Cold War relic, was reactivated as a functional security framework, with Exercise Bersama Lima (the annual FPDA exercise) expanded in scope and complexity. The UK's post-Brexit "tilt to the Indo-Pacific" and Australia's AUKUS-driven defence modernisation gave the FPDA renewed strategic relevance as a framework for coordinating non-US Western security engagement in Southeast Asia.

Wong also continued Singapore's defence engagement with France (through the bilateral Strategic Partnership, which includes joint exercises and defence technology cooperation), Japan (expanded maritime security cooperation in the South China Sea approaches), and — more cautiously — with ASEAN neighbours through the ADMM-Plus (ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting Plus) framework. The ADMM-Plus remained the primary multilateral security forum for the region, though its consensus-based decision-making limited its ability to address the most sensitive issues (South China Sea, Myanmar).

The most significant defence policy development under Wong was the acceleration of the SAF's "Next Generation" transformation — a restructuring of the military around AI-enabled capabilities, unmanned systems, cyber warfare, and precision strike, announced under Lee but implemented under Wong. The defence budget, maintained at roughly 3% of GDP over the long run , was increasingly allocated to technology-intensive capabilities that enhanced Singapore's deterrence posture without requiring an expansion of the conscript force that an ageing population could not sustain.

9. Stress Tests: The Hormuz Crisis and the Tariff Shock

Wong's foreign policy faced two real-time stress tests, in 2025 and 2026, that illuminated both its strengths and its vulnerabilities.

The tariff shock of April 2025 was the first — economic rather than military, but no less consequential for a trade-dependent economy. Singapore's response illustrated the Wong government's crisis management approach: clear public communication (Wong's video message of 4 April 2025, two days after the 2 April announcement, warned that "the era of rules-based globalisation and free trade is over"), a decision not to retaliate, the creation of the Singapore Economic Resilience Taskforce (SERT) under DPM Gan Kim Yong, announced on 8 April 2025, and simultaneous pursuit of bilateral engagement and structural adaptation through trade diversification (SG-O-02). (No S$2 billion "Stabilisation and Support Package" announced in a "2025 Budget supplementary statement" has been located.)

The Strait of Hormuz crisis was the second, and it struck at Singapore's most fundamental vulnerability: its dependence on maritime trade routes for survival. It began not in 2025 but on 28 February 2026, when US and Israeli strikes on Iran killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; Iran declared the Strait closed on 2 March 2026 (SG-F-27). Over 70% of Singapore's crude oil imports originate in the Middle East, and the Jurong Island refineries are configured for Gulf crude. The MFA issued a statement on 28 February 2026, and on 7 April 2026 Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, DPM Gan Kim Yong and Coordinating Minister for National Security K Shanmugam made statements in Parliament: Balakrishnan said Singapore would not negotiate over passage through an international strait and called the closure "an Asian crisis". Domestic preparedness ran through the Homefront Crisis Ministerial Committee chaired by Shanmugam, with the Jurong Rock Caverns as the strategic petroleum buffer. The crisis exposed the fragility of Singapore's energy supply chain and reinforced the case for energy diversification. Wong's own register on it came at the May Day Rally of 1 May 2026, where he told workers "The storm came, we did not hide. We did not retreat" (SG-F-27).

The stress tests revealed a foreign policy apparatus that was operationally competent but strategically constrained. Singapore could manage crises effectively — the institutional machinery built over decades functioned as designed — but it could not prevent them. The vulnerability of a small, open, trade-dependent city-state to external shocks was structural, not policy-correctable. Wong's foreign policy doctrine, with its emphasis on resilience and diversification, was an acknowledgment of this structural reality: the goal was not to eliminate vulnerability but to build the capacity to absorb and recover from disruptions that Singapore could not prevent.

10. Shangri-La Dialogue 2026 and the Kazan Summit: Non-Alignment Restated in Two Registers

Two events in mid-2026 gave Wong's foreign policy doctrine its clearest public restatement to date: the 23rd IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, held in Singapore from 29 to 31 May 2026, and PM Wong's own attendance at the ASEAN-Russia Commemorative Summit (ARCS) in Kazan on 17–18 June 2026. Together they illustrate the doctrine's two registers -- defence-security non-alignment articulated at home, and ASEAN-multilateral engagement with a sanctioned great power conducted abroad -- and the tension between them.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue plenary session on "Evolving Security Partnerships in a Fragmenting World" on 31 May 2026 (MINDEF announcement, 28 May 2026), Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing gave Singapore's clearest single-sentence formulation of the non-alignment doctrine that this document has traced through Wong's speeches since 2024. In his closing remarks, as reported in regional press, Chan said that ASEAN should not be framed as "pro-US or anti-US, nor pro-China or anti-China", and urged the region to focus on competing with the rest of the world rather than among its members . The formulation is not new in substance -- it restates the equidistance principle at the core of Singapore's foreign policy since Rajaratnam -- but its bluntness, delivered by the Defence Minister rather than the Prime Minister or Foreign Minister, mark it as this document's addition to the corpus of quotable Singapore non-alignment formulations, alongside Lee Kuan Yew's "hard truths" register and Wong's own more technocratic idiom (Section 3). The inclusion of SLD 2026 reflects the Dialogue's continued function as the venue where Singapore's security establishment states its positioning most directly, in contrast to the more economically-coded language Wong himself favours in other settings.

Three weeks later, PM Wong's own attendance at the ASEAN-Russia Commemorative Summit in Kazan (17–18 June 2026) tested the same doctrine in its harder-edged form: engagement with a great power under Singapore's own unilateral sanctions. Wong attended ARCS at President Putin's invitation -- the summit marked the 35th anniversary of ASEAN-Russia relations and adopted the Kazan Declaration, a Joint Statement on Cultural Cooperation, and the ASEAN-Russia Comprehensive Plan of Action (2026–2030) -- in his capacity as an ASEAN head of government engaging a Dialogue Partner, and used his remarks to welcome Russia's support for ASEAN Centrality, encourage its continued participation in ASEAN-led mechanisms, and call for upholding international law (MFA press statement, 18 June 2026). On the summit's sidelines, Wong met President Putin "at Russia's request, as part of the programme for ARCS" (MFA) -- his first visit to Russia, by a Tatarstan government account -- and afterwards restated on social media that Singapore's position on Ukraine reflects respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, not alignment with any side . He then proceeded to Istanbul on 19 June to meet President Erdoğan while transiting home. The full analysis of what this bilateral encounter means for the Singapore-Russia relationship specifically, and the qualification it requires to that relationship's "sacrificed on the altar of principle" framing, is in SG-F-46 (Section 11); what belongs in this document is the observation that Kazan is Wong's clearest demonstration to date that refusing to be framed as for or against any single power (Chan's SLD formulation, there applied to ASEAN as a whole) extends even to a dialogue partner Singapore itself has sanctioned -- provided the engagement occurs within a multilateral frame that ASEAN as a bloc has chosen to maintain, rather than as a bilateral normalisation Singapore alone would have to justify.

Read together, the SLD and Kazan episodes show a foreign policy doctrine applying the same underlying logic in two different keys: refusing binary alignment on defence and security questions at home, and refusing to let a bilateral principled stance (the Russia sanctions) foreclose participation in the multilateral architecture ASEAN has built around a sanctioned partner abroad. Whether this is best described as doctrinal consistency or as the doctrine absorbing an increasing number of hard cases without a clear governing rule for resolving them is a question this document leaves open for its next revision.

11. Conclusion and Spiral Index

Lawrence Wong's foreign policy doctrine, assessed at the two-year mark, is best understood as principled pragmatism adapted for an age of compounding disruptions. The principles — sovereignty, international law, non-alignment, ASEAN centrality — are unchanged. The pragmatism is being recalibrated for a world in which the US is an unreliable guardian of the rules-based order, China is a more assertive and less predictable power, and the multilateral institutions that Singapore has relied on are weakened by great power rivalry and institutional decay.

Wong's distinctive contributions are threefold. First, the rhetorical shift toward resilience as an organising concept — a framework that integrates foreign policy, economic policy, and national security into a unified strategic posture. Second, the Global South pivot — a recognition that Singapore's diplomatic network needs to expand beyond its traditional focus on the great powers, ASEAN, and the established multilateral system. Third, the neighbourhood reset — particularly the JS-SEZ initiative with Malaysia, which represents the most ambitious bilateral economic integration project in Singapore's history.

The limitations are equally clear. Wong lacks the personal diplomatic capital that Lee Hsien Loong accumulated over two decades as prime minister and three decades as a global interlocutor. The structural constraints on Singapore's foreign policy — small size, trade dependence, geographic vulnerability, absence of natural resources — are not amenable to policy innovation. And the geopolitical environment is deteriorating faster than Singapore's diplomatic toolkit can adapt: the tariff shock, the Hormuz crisis, the South China Sea escalation, and the continued erosion of multilateral institutions all tested a foreign policy apparatus that was designed for a more orderly world.

The ultimate judgment on Wong's foreign policy will depend on factors largely beyond his control — whether US-China competition stabilises or escalates, whether ASEAN recovers institutional coherence or continues to fragment, whether the rules-based order is reformed or replaced. What Wong can control is the quality of Singapore's diplomatic engagement, the breadth of its partnerships, and the resilience of its economic and institutional infrastructure. On these dimensions, the early evidence suggests competence, continuity, and cautious adaptation — a foreign policy that is adequate for the current moment, though the current moment is testing the limits of adequacy.

Spiral Index — Navigation Pointers:

For the foundational doctrine: SG-F-01 (Foundations of Foreign Policy)
For the US relationship: SG-F-02 (Singapore and the US)
For the China relationship: SG-F-03 (Singapore and China)
For neighbourhood dynamics: SG-F-04 (Malaysia), SG-F-05 (Indonesia)
For the Hormuz crisis: SG-F-27 (Iran-Israel-US War)
For ASEAN context: SG-O-09 (Geopolitical Realignment — ASEAN in Flux)
For the leadership transition: SG-B-09 (Lawrence Wong Transition)
For the 2025 election: SG-K-34 (General Election 2025)
For geopolitical environment: SG-O-03 (Geopolitical Mega Trends)
For international perceptions: SG-N-01 (International Perceptions)

SG-F-28 | Lawrence Wong's Foreign Policy Doctrine — Continuity, Recalibration, and the Post-LHL Era (2024–2026)