What is this protean thing we call “security”? The common meaning is freedom from fear or danger. Can one seek security in the abstract or in absolute terms? I doubt it. Unless contextualised by specific circumstances and given focus by reference to specific threats or challenges, such a quixotic quest is more likely to lead to perpetual insecurity. If one does not know what one fears then everything may seem fearful. But even when a specific threat can be identified, no two countries, even the closest of allies, will ever have exactly the same assessment of any particular situation or de ne their interests in exactly the same way. Assessments and interests change over time as circumstances change or sometimes even when they do not. And since fear is a subjective psychological phenomenon, even within a single country, security will not mean exactly the same thing to a diplomat, to an intelligence officer, to a soldier or a policemen, let alone the trade official or the bean counter in the Finance Ministry. Or even the man in the street. Reflecting back on my career in the Foreign Ministry — a career that spanned more than three decades — what strikes me most now is incoherence. Although we may fondly believe otherwise, every country’s policy in every domain is always a series of messy improvisations in response to unpredictable events. Consistency is only possible at such a high level of generality as to be practically useless. A foolish consistency can in fact be harmful. I have never understood the obsession of some academics with the so-called “grand strategy”; a meaningless term. One must set goals. But having done so, all one can do is keep a distant star in sight even as one tacks hither and thither to avoid treacherous reefs and shoals or to scoop up opportunities that might drift within reach. Nor are the stars that we steer by necessarily constant. The first third or so of my career coincided with the last decade of the Cold War, not that anyone then knew that the Cold War was ending. The remaining two thirds were in the post-Cold War, an era that we are still experiencing and whose meaning is still subject to debate, so much so that we cannot even describe it except by reference to its past. Each era had its own complexities and contradictions.

In recent years, queer studies has increasingly interrogated the racial and colonial unconscious embedded in the earlier studies of non-normative genders and sexualities through the critical frameworks of queer of color critique and queer diaspora studies. This article aims to 'queer the transnational turn' by considering what critical edge 'regionalism' might bring to the investigation of queer modernities in Asia from both contemporary and historical vantage points. The introductory section of the article provides a broad overview of the 'transnational turn' in queer studies, what we diagnose as the 'area unconscious' of queer studies in its exclusive critique of Western colonial modernity, and the related binary of cultural particularism versus Eurocentric universalism. Alternatively, we argue that the concept of regionalism can be productively mobilized in order to study the various scales of queer sexualities that traffic within and circulate across Southeast Asia, Australia, imperial China, and contemporary Sinophone cultures (Sinitic-language communities on the margins of or outside mainland China). Through a paired reading of Johann S. Lee's Singaporean queer novel, Peculiar Chris (1992), and Su Chao-Bin and John Woo's Sinophone martial art film, the Reign of Assassins (2010), our inquiry accounts for how the spatial-temporal telos of global queering get materially translated across multiple regional hubs of sexual differences. Queer regionalism in Singapore, China, and the Sinophone worlds encompasses relational dynamics, power differentials, and subnational and supranational linkages. Finally, queering regionalism can open up new analytical frameworks for the study of sexualities and corporealities across transcolonial relations and wider temporal and spatial connections.

This article explores an oft-neglected episode of the Singapore-Republic of China diplomatic relationship between 1965 and 1971–centred on the issue of Chinese representation in the United Nations. Relying on declassified archival materials from the Australian, British, and Taiwanese foreign ministries, this article illustrates the existence of repeated self-serving and opportunistic behaviour on Singapore’s part that sought to maintain the island-state’s national interests at the expense of the ROC’s interests on the Chinese representation issue. It challenges prevailing laudatory accounts of Singapore’s foreign policy of pragmatism by providing three observations. First, that the island-state’s presumption that it could separate economic and political matters at will in executing its diplomacy did not always engender optimal outcomes for itself. Second, that Singapore’s assertion of non-alignment in international issues did not prevent it from orientating its diplomacy towards facilitating outcomes to those issues that it perceived would best serve its core interests. Third, that the island-state’s professed desire to maximise its allies and minimise its adversaries did not necessarily mean that Singapore did not seek opportunities to exploit its partners’ vulnerabilities to serve its national interests. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.