Shangri-La Dialogue 2022

After a two year COVID-enforced hiatus, Asia’s most important defence summit returns this weekend. 

The Shangri-La Dialogue, held annually in Singapore, is the biggest single event on the regional defence calendar and provides an invaluable opportunity for defence ministers, officials and analysts to come together, exchange views, and take the pulse of regional security. Victoria University's Professor David Capie has this from Singapore.  

There are two parts to the Dialogue. The first is the set-piece panels, where ministers take the stage in a grand hotel ballroom, give formal speeches and then take questions from the floor.

These speeches provide an opportunity for ministers to signal about what’s keeping them awake at night, where they see the threats and opportunities, and what they plan to do about it. The Q&A sessions can often get feisty.  

In 2017, one questioner congratulated Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis on a great speech and then asked why Asian leaders should believe any of it, when it might all be contradicted by a tweet from the president.

In 2019, the Chinese defence minister was pressed about mass internment camps in Xinjiang and the killings in Tiananmen Square.

Singapore's Shangri-La Hotel, which lends its name to the annual security summit/ photo wikimedia

Alongside this there’s also a parallel world of closed door officials’ meetings, where officials grab the chance to talk to their counterparts while they all happen to be stuck in the same hotel for a weekend.

Even a comparatively small player like New Zealand will arrange more than 20 of these ‘bilaterals’ over the course of the two days. It’s basically national security speed-dating. You sit down with your opposite number, talk about what you might have in common, possibly ask for something you want, and gently try and navigate around the bits where you don’t really see eye to eye.

For Defence Minister Peeni Henare, this will be his first trip to Asia and an important opportunity to hear about the region’s concerns.

The bilaterals will be valuable way for him to meet most of his counterparts for the first time, including the new Australian defence minister Richard Marles. It isn’t yet confirmed whether Henare will meet with US Secretary of Defense Austin or Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe, but it’s highly likely they will have some sort of interaction, if only an informal ‘pull aside’ – a quick but still much-valued opportunity for a chat.

As well as the US and China, Henare will have the chance to meet with ministers he’s only zoomed with before from across Asia and Europe. All that face time will be well worth the 10 hour flight.

In terms of the substance of the Dialogue, this year the shadow of the Ukraine conflict will unsurprisingly loom large. Most countries are looking to boost their defence budgets and are worried about a much more challenging global security environment, including a tighter Sino-Russian relationship and more confrontational US-China ties. 

Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida/ photo wikimedia

Japanese Prime Minister Kishida will open the conference on Friday night and his speech will be scrutinised for what it says about his vision for Japan playing a more active role in regional security.

By tradition, Saturday morning begins with a keynote from the US Secretary of Defence, and Lloyd Austin is expected to offer some additional details about the US’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

He will surely talk about the US commitment to Ukraine, while also needing to reassure some in the audience that the Indo-Pacific region remains an American priority. After President Biden’s recent comments in Tokyo, the issue of US involvement in any Taiwan conflict may come up, as well as concerns about maritime disputes in the South and East China Seas.

China’s defence minister Wei Fenghe starts the second day with his own keynote. At his first Dialogue in 2019 he struck a fairly defiant tone, rejecting accusations that China was undermining regional security and blaming tensions in the South China Sea on “countries outside the region”. 

For his part, Peeni Henare is on a panel on ‘climate change and green defence’, which will give him a chance to talk about the recent Defence Assessment as well as one of his ministerial priorities, the Pacific.

For many years the South Pacific was absent from Shangri-La discussions, which tended to be focused more on tensions in Northeast Asia, North Korea, or great power politics.

But the 2019 Dialogue featured a special session that brought Pacific voices into the conversation.

This year we can expect to hear lots about war in Europe and great power competition in Asia.

But in the wake of the recent China – Solomon Islands security deal and Wang Yi’s high profile visit through the region, we can also expect the Pacific to feature more prominently again.

- Asia Media Centre