THE STANDARD conversation starter amongst the mildly panicked shipping executives gathered in Singapore for the annual maritime week events runs something like this. Executive A will make some generic quip about living in interesting times then nervously ask executive B how he views the world and what is happening.

Executive B, if he is being honest, will point out that he has not read the news in the past 30 minutes and therefore has no idea what is happening, but it is probably not great.

The uncertainty is palpable and the shipping industry is suffering a strategic paralysis as a result.

Everything is being given a second review and risk assessments are starting from scratch. The previously held assumptions underlying business cases are no longer valid in a world where there is insufficient predictability to second guess what direction the next 24 hour news cycle will take.

And yet, the view from Asia is a more pragmatic one than in Europe right now.

When Singapore’s political elite were wheeled out to open proceedings this week, they pulled no punches in listing the factors responsible for the rapidly fragmenting world trading system.

“Some big powers are adopting a more transactional, sometimes coercive, approach to achieve immediate objectives; and giving less weight to more indirect and longer-term benefits,” explained Singapore’s minister of state Murali Pillai, in a speech on Monday that left nobody guessing who he was referring to.

These structural shifts have accelerated in recent months. The Trump view is that the erstwhile win-win view of international trade, investments, or multilateral agreements is dead. The US has been treated “unfairly by its trading partners, both friend and foe”.

Singapore, like many others now caught between a US rock and a Chinese hard place, cannot afford to see the world through such binary terms as friend of foe.

As minister Pillai pointed out, trade is an existential matter for Singapore.

The US may be determined to deploy tariffs to re-shape the landscape of global trade in its best interest, but the real defence of globalism and multilateralism is now falling to Asia.

In a thinly veiled swipe at what Beijing sees as western protectionism, China’s Premier Li Qiang urged attendees at the China Development Forum on Sunday to be “staunch defenders” of globalisation and “resist unilateralism”.

Even with globalisation in retreat, there are still sufficient numbers of states left clinging on to the belief that trade can be a win-win proposition. Certainly, that was the view of EU members and the UK during the European shipping summit last week, but there the existential crisis comes with political inertia.

At Singapore Maritime Week the locals’ list of regional defenders seem more motivated in their bid to find opportunity in the shifting sands of global trade.

Whether this really is a coalition of willing partners prepared to preserve oases of stability amid a world of chaos, is not yet clear. And whether Singapore really is able to stay neutral on who they consider to be friend or foe should the US press them, remains to be seen.

Should the trade war escalate then there will be casualties, and at this point it may yet be a case of having to pick sides.

Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List

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