Singapore’s relations with the Gulf: from defensive to positive engagement

Abstract

In the early 2000s, the Middle East was not high on the list of Singapore’s priorities. Of late, however, a more purposeful engagement with the Gulf is evident. This paper adopts an approach grounded in foreign policy analysis to analyze the extent to which Singapore’s engagement with the Gulf is shaped by security-related developments in the latter. It draws largely upon qualitative analysis, interviews, and quantitative data from sources in Singapore. Section one provides the relevant theoretical overview according to which domestic sources, in this case Singapore’s strategic culture of “vulnerability,” frames the conduct of foreign policy. Section two examines Singapore-Gulf relations along three security-related pathways–public order, economic prosperity, and domestic energy mix–and the extent to which they are filtered by the city-state’s “vulnerability.” Section three concludes with some thoughts about the outlook for maintaining the momentum in relations between interlocutors on the fringes of Asia.