Glass Clock: Visible, ticking, breakable.
Hello, I'm launching Glass Clock, a substack publication on geopolitics x technology. Here, I’ll attempt to reflect on what happens when AI and digital systems compress decision-making and signal-to-action, creating an illusion of clarity in strategic conditions that remain fundamentally opaque. And that's the condition international relations is entering.
Glass Clock is also where I'll share ongoing research from my studies at King's College London's Department of War Studies, working through questions like - How do smaller states preserve autonomy when great powers compete? How does technology alter deterrence, escalation, coercion, and alliance behaviour? When does visibility create stability - and when does it create the false confidence that precedes kinetic escalation?
I'll write primarily from Singapore and the Asia-Pacific vantage point on topics ranging from AI capabilities and governance to cyber defence, energy security, digital sovereignty, media infrastructure, and population health. If you're someone trying to understand the world as it is rather than as we wish it were - you're welcome to subscribe.
Glass Clock countdowns -
#1. Securing the sovereign foundations of Singapore’s AI economy (The Business Times, 19 May 2026.)
For Singapore, AI sovereignty is the practical task of ensuring that dependence on others cannot be turned against us, while preserving our ability to run the economy on our own interests. In the AI era, these dependencies include – among other key inputs – an assured access to AI models, tokens and compute capacity.
As the government acts on the ESR, it should therefore approach our AI-enabled economic transformation as two parts: upgrading skills and businesses on the surface; and, beneath that, building a sovereign foundation that cannot be arbitrarily cut off or priced out of reach.
That is a structural mandate for national leadership – and not a problem that individual companies or workers alone can solve.
#2. Silicon Schengen Is Europe’s Play. An AI Archipelago Could Be ASEAN’s (The Diplomat, 4 June 2025.)
In June last year, I published a piece in The Diplomat, arguing that ASEAN needed its own answer to Europe's Silicon Schengen: An AI Archipelago - regionally distributed, functionally integrated, and built on a semiconductor-to-model-to-adoption chain - that draws on the intrinsic strengths of its member states.
The essay grew out of a panel I chaired at Echelon Singapore 2025, “Building in the Semiconductor Age", where founders and investors worked through the same questions the piece addressed; namely, supply chains, partnerships, and where the region actually stands strategically. I’m glad that we’ve made some progress since: SEA-LION v4, a Singapore-built, multi-lingual AI model, now covers 11 Southeast Asian languages, and ranks first among open models under 200 billion parameters on SEA-HELM; ASEAN concluded Digital Economy Framework Agreement negotiations in May 2026, targeting signature at the ASEAN Summit in November this year, convened in the Philippines; Data centre investment has accelerated across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. What’s interesting about the AI Archipelago is the potential of its compounding effect: Semiconductor resilience, sovereign compute, locally trusted models, mainstream adoption, and the formation of a regional production base.
More fundamentally, AI is a dual-use technology. The same compute stack that runs a regional logistics model runs surveillance, signals intelligence, and targeting - and, increasingly, the capacity to compress the OODA loop to machine speed.
"Shared values are the decor, but when the building is under threat, states reinforce the structure rather than redecorate." That is the closing line of my latest op-ed in Asia Times on July’s NATO summit in Ankara. I wrote this piece just after Prime Minister Carney announced that Canada would opt for a German submarine over South Korea’s technically comparable Hanwha KSS-III, on the grounds of European supply-chain integration. Hanwha’s own statement, issued after the decision, conceded that it “was unable to overcome the barrier posed by NATO alliances.”
Indeed, we now know the summit has delivered tens of billions in arms deals, structured firmly inside the treaty perimeter. The same logic is visible in the Indo-Pacific, where US–Korea, US–Japan and other alliances inside the American-led security architecture channel the largest, most strategically significant defence commitments to those already embedded in the core, not to capable partners standing just outside it.
In other words, while values alignment and democratic credentials receive ample rhetorical flourish from some summit leaders, states ultimately consolidate around allies who share the same threat perimeter and whose inclusion reinforces the prevailing balance of power.