KUALA LUMPUR: After a two-year hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Shangri-La Dialogue (SLD) was back in full swing at the weekend in that somewhat secluded corner just off the main streets of Singapore.

The size of the cohorts of SLD participants was supposedly slimmed down a bit perhaps due to lingering pandemic concerns, although the hustle and bustle of major defense delegations shuffling in and out of and through the majestic lobby, the grand ballroom and the cozy meeting rooms of the Shangri-La Hotel seemed as plentiful as ever. And the rhetorical intensity of the seniormost international interlocutors, as well as the consequent general “heat” of the discussion mood, were also as high as in most of the pre-pandemic SLDs.

The SLD was conceived more than two decades ago as a quasi-official platform for face-to-face communications primarily among the senior defense and security officials of the region. It gradually expanded to welcoming many such officials from the major powers around the world. And at least since I started attending SLD about a decade ago, the larger-than-life United StatesChina confrontation in Asia-Pacific and beyond has come to dominate the mainstream discourse of SLD.

SLD typically spreads over three days, and opens with a dinner featuring a prominent head of government as keynote speaker. This year the Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida took the stage. In addition to the general US-China brinkmanship game which almost perennially looms in the background of most SLD discussions, a timely and fortuitously “hot” security-related topic or two would typically also pop up to grab the main attention of SLD participants. And this year it was the crisis in Ukraine.

Kishida quipped at the SLD opening dinner that today’s Ukraine could be tomorrow’s East Asia. As Japan neighbors Russia to the north where the two countries do have long-standing — at least since the end of the Second World War — territorial disputes, and Japan has joined the Western powers in implementing sanctions against Russia during this Ukraine crisis, Kishida’s comparison could be surmised by many as alluding to Russian intentions in this part of the world. But Japan has also long worried about the often belligerent posture of North Korea, and has from time to time run