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.
#3. NATO summit arms deals show realism trumps values (Asia Times, 8 July 2026.)
"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.
#4. Why national security – not market forces – will define the US-China AI race (The Business Times, 17 July 2026.)
Last week, United States President Donald Trump accused China of carrying out the “largest compromise” of data from the 2020 US election. In a televised primetime address, he vowed to declassify intelligence on “shocking vulnerabilities” in the US election system. If his allegations are borne out, it will be a serious scandal. For now, that remains a big “IF”.
Mr. Biden won that election - and then got tougher on China than Mr. Trump did. And that is the reality of international politics: Leaders matter, but not as much as the balance of power and security pressures within which states have to operate.
The same logic applies to the #AI race.
I penned an essay in The Business Times on 17 July, setting out why and how security, not economic interests alone, will shape the AI race between great powers. In international politics, AI now sits at the intersection of economic productivity and military capability, and will be shaped above all by the security architecture within which those systems operate. In security competitions, core AI capabilities are not left to pure market forces.
#5. With or without China, Shangri-La Dialogue is still relevant (Asia Times, 8 June 2026.)
Held annually in Singapore since 2002, the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue is Asia’s leading defence summit, convening senior security officials from more than 40 countries for strategic debate and bilateral diplomacy.
On 8 June, I argued in an Asia Times commentary, “With or Without China, Shangri-La Dialogue Is Still Relevant”, that the SLD need not serve simultaneously as a US-anchored security forum and a neutral platform for US-China dialogue to remain relevant and purposeful.
For any smaller state, autonomy exists in the space that competing great powers leave open as they constrain one another.
Singapore can speak sincerely to both Washington and Beijing; host the SLD; send ministers to China’s Xiangshan Forum; sustain the Agreement on Defence Exchanges and Security Cooperation with China; and deepen US access arrangements. It can do all this only because the regional balance of power remains credible.
That same balance explains two earlier pieces I wrote for The Diplomat: One on Singapore’s September 2025 decision to acquire US-built P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, and another on its role in China’s New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, published in May 2026.
The former strengthens interoperability with a US-led maritime security architecture. The latter reinforces Singapore’s value as a commercial and logistical node for China.
These the practical expression of strategic autonomy under a stable balance of power: Without sustained US regional commitment, there is no balance; without balance, no autonomy; without autonomy, Singapore’s diplomacy has little ground on which to stand.
At this year’s SLD, Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing cited Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong’s counsel: “We cannot control the sea, but we can certainly keep our boat seaworthy.”
True. But even a seaworthy boat needs sea lanes that no single power can control or toll.
#6. Smaller states haven’t had to pick sides — only because the balance between the superpowers still holds (Medium, 4 August 2026.)
On July 6, a Chinese nuclear submarine launched a “strategic missile” carrying a dummy warhead into the Pacific Ocean. Beijing described it as routine training, said it had warned relevant governments and insisted that no country was being targeted.
But the missile reportedly landed near the exclusive economic zones of Tuvalu and Kiribati, in a region still shaped by the legacy of hundreds of nuclear tests conducted by the United States, Britain, and France, who remain P5 members.
Tuvalu, Palau and the Solomon Islands criticised the launch. Yet when the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum met in Fiji, it could not agree on a collective statement.
This is a realist example of how power works.
Great-power China set the terms: When to launch, how much warning to provide, and what counted as an acceptable explanation. The Pacific states could react, but they could not determine the rules - or even produce a unified response.
It also illustrates the central argument of my latest Medium essay: Smaller states possess room for manoeuvre not because they have escaped great-power competition, but because the balance between competing powers still makes coercion costly in some places.
That strategic space, therefore, is conditional; it expands or contracts according to the local balance of power.
My essay is a rejoinder to Clement Tan’s Straits Times argument that middle powers and small states are navigating great-power competition through diversification, hedging and “overlapping networks”.
There is truth in Mr Tan’s account. But it confuses diplomatic activity with structural power.
Hedging can help smaller states manage dependence (note: Smaller, not just small states). Networks can raise the cost of coercion. Neither changes the basic hierarchy: Great powers construct the competing orders, control critical technologies and decide when pressure is worth the geopolitical cost.
The absence of forced choice is therefore not solely achieved by the agency of smaller states. It is also a great-power calculation. Yet, at the same time, if a great power overplays its hand, it may drive smaller states into precisely the alignment it most fears.
#7. What Singapore’s Poseidon purchase tells us about its foreign policy worldview (The Diplomat, 16 September 2025.)
Singapore’s four P-8A Poseidons last year demonstrate how a smaller state can exercise autonomy while working alongside its security partners. I set out the full argument in The Diplomat on 16 September 2025.
The shared interest with the United States and its partners is welcome, and Singapore is also acting on its own constraints. The Port of Singapore handled 41.1 million TEUs in 2024, Changi moved over 67 million passengers, and by 2028 the island-state will host more than 40 subsea cables. Defence is the condition on which that economy exists.
That same exercise of strategic autonomy takes China’s interests into account. Beijing has substantial stakes in these waters: Over 80 percent of its seaborne oil transits the Malacca Strait, and its energy and food security rest on the same sea lanes Singapore is helping to keep safe. When the P-8A first flew US missions from Paya Lebar in December 2015, Beijing raised concerns any state in its position would raise. The RSAF’s own Poseidons will now be operated by a smaller state whose interest in a stable maritime commons is shared with China’s — and with everyone else’s.
I hope that you’ll read this essay alongside my companion essay in The Diplomat on the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, penned in May 2026.