https://archive.ph/dm2k6

Key excerpts from this article:

“This provides small countries like Singapore more room for maneuver than if there was only a single power dominating our region,” he said. “Naturally, we do not want the major powers to make Asia their battleground or conduct proxy wars here.” Singapore enjoys close ties its neighbors and has recently made progress on longstanding disputes that have tested those relationships in the past. Resolving these issues has taken greater urgency as the region comes to grips with the prospect of conflict in Asia due in part to tensions between the US and China over Taiwan.

Last year, Indonesia and Singapore settled a dispute over airspace and signed an extradition deal after years of disagreement. Earlier this month, Singapore agreed to temporarily suspend development and reclamation activities on an island that’s been a source of tension with Malaysia even though the International Court of Justice ruled in 2008 the city-state had sovereignty over it.

Previously we have discussed the traditional tactic of Asian countries that actually care about their own self interests and how they go about maintaining it in an increasingly hostile environment. Essentially the idea is they try to take a neutral stance between two opposing powers (US and China), play a balancing act, and try to see how they can use the two sides competing with each other in regards to closer ties with other Asian nations to their advantage. As a result, those countries that have played this balancing act has seen some concrete results in terms of trade surpluses, infrastructure, cheaper energy and resources, a buffer against rising inflation, as well as a boost to their defensive capabilities due to deals giving them military training and equipment. Those that decided to be complete shills for the US however, are seeing the exact opposite (see most of western europe as an example).

However, recently playing this balancing act has become increasingly difficult. The US is well aware of this tactic and has been trying to escalate tensions in the Asian region (China/taiwan, dprk/rok/japan, south china sea disputes, ladakh border, etc) in order to force these nations to pick a side in this conflict and eventually get directly involved in a hot war. We've already seen this happen in Europe recently. Initially Europe was hesitant to completely sever ties with Russia during the initial offensive into Ukraine, partly because some of them were economically linked to Russia (Russia and Ukraine have an enormous supply of natural resources, food, commodities, and fuel) and severing those ties, such as cancelling Nord Stream 2 would result in an energy and resource crisis in their homelands. As a result, the US forced them to chose a side by threatening their leaders, as well as allegedly launching covert operations with Norway to destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipelines. This provided a strong incentive for Europe to chose the side of the US, and damage their own manufacturing and industrial base at 5x the cost in order to support America's.

There is another reason why the US wanted to force Europe to act this way as well, and it's the sole fact that they consider the Euro a threat to the status of the global dollar reserve and their ideal of a unipolar world order. Blackmailing Europe to damage their own economy in this way, served their goals and they would like to repeat the same thing in Asia as well.

Singapore and many other asian nations seem to realize this as noted outright in the article where they mention that they do not want to part of a proxy war between the US and China and want to forge stronger relations with each other as a hedge. As a result, they've managed to solve some disputes they've had with Malaysia and Indonesia. ASEAN itself has been responsible for settling disputes between nations in a peaceful matter as well as increasing cooperation in a variety of fields.