SINGAPORE’S PRECARIOUS PIVOT POINT
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The escalating war of words between the Chinese Embassy in Manila and Philippine legislators is more than a bilateral spat. It is straining the conditions under which Singapore — a non-claimant, trade-dependent city-state — hopes to broker a South China Sea Code of Conduct (CoC) when it assumes the ASEAN chair in 2027.
Singapore’s entire strategic posture rests on keeping both its largest trading partner (China) and its security guarantor (the United States) sufficiently satisfied while preserving ASEAN’s relevance as a diplomatic framework. The current trajectory in Manila threatens all three simultaneously.
The Scarborough Shoal precedent of 2012 — in which quiet diplomacy rewarded Chinese non-compliance — haunts Manila’s decision-making, but the transparency alternative generates exactly the kind of rhetorical heat that complicates Singapore’s preferred mode of ‘constructive ambiguity.’
I. The Anatomy of a Diplomatic Crisis
The Philippines–China row that the Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila attempted to cool on February 11, 2026, did not begin with a single incident. It emerged from a slow structural collision between two incompatible doctrines of deterrence: Beijing’s preference for managed opacity and Manila’s deliberate strategy of radical transparency.
Since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office in 2022 and reversed his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte’s policy of muted accommodation toward China, the Philippine Coast Guard has pursued an aggressive public documentation campaign. Video footage of Chinese water-cannoning, laser-dazzling, and vessel-ramming operations — distributed directly to international media — has reframed the South China Sea dispute from an abstract sovereignty argument to a concrete, visible set of daily confrontations. The strategy has worked diplomatically: as of early 2026, sixty governments have publicly affirmed the 2016 Arbitral Award as legally binding, a figure that would have seemed implausible a decade ago.
China’s response to this transparency offensive has been, unusually, to personalize it. The Chinese Embassy in Manila publicly targeted Coast Guard spokesperson Commodore Jay Tarriela by name, accusing him of defaming President Xi Jinping. This was a significant departure from standard diplomatic practice, and it produced an equally unusual counter-reaction: the Philippine Senate passed a resolution condemning the embassy’s statements, which Beijing then dismissed as a ‘political stunt.’ The Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs’ newly appointed maritime affairs spokesperson, Rogelio Villanueva, was left urging the Chinese Embassy to engage in a ‘calm’ and ‘professional’ manner — an appeal that acknowledged the deteriorating rhetorical environment while declining to capitulate to it.
“The DFA values candid and vigorous debate with its foreign counterparts on important issues consistent with the Philippines’ democratic tradition.” — DFA Maritime Affairs Spokesperson Rogelio Villanueva, February 11, 2026
The Philippine Senate’s resolution carried a broader legal argument, advanced by Senator Risa Hontiveros: that China’s embassy statements may have violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations by publicly attempting to censure and restrain the expression of Philippine officials within their own country. Whether or not that legal argument is ultimately sustained, it stakes out a normative position of considerable importance — that the Chinese Embassy’s conduct was not merely diplomatically rude but potentially unlawful under the very international conventions that govern diplomatic relations.
For Singapore, watching this unfold from a diplomatic distance, the spectacle is deeply uncomfortable. The city-state depends on a world in which international law is treated as a constraining force on great-power behavior, and in which ASEAN remains a credible diplomatic forum. Both premises are being tested in real time.
II. The Ghost of Scarborough: Why Manila Distrusts Private Diplomacy
The Scarborough Shoal incident of 2012 occupies a particular place in Philippine strategic memory, and understanding its psychological weight is essential to understanding why Manila has pursued its current transparency-first approach with such consistency.
In April 2012, Chinese fishing vessels were discovered operating in Scarborough Shoal — a feature that lies within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone but which China also claims. A standoff between Philippine and Chinese vessels ensued. Diplomatic back-channels, reportedly facilitated in part through American intermediaries, produced what Manila understood to be a mutual withdrawal agreement: both sides would stand down their vessels and allow the situation to de-escalate. The Philippines complied. China did not. Chinese vessels remained and have since effectively controlled access to the shoal, preventing Philippine fishermen from operating in waters they had worked for generations.
That episode encoded a lesson into the institutional memory of Philippine foreign policy: quiet agreements with Beijing carry no enforcement mechanism beyond China’s willingness to honor them, and that willingness has proven contingent on whether compliance serves Chinese interests at any given moment. Public commitments, by contrast, are harder to quietly abandon. International visibility creates a form of accountability — not perfect, not guaranteed, but meaningfully more durable than private understandings. Every video released by the Philippine Coast Guard is, in this framing, a form of pre-commitment technology that makes Chinese non-compliance more costly.
The Scarborough Shoal episode encoded a lesson: quiet agreements with Beijing carry no enforcement mechanism beyond China’s willingness to honor them. Public commitments are harder to quietly abandon.
This is the strategic logic that the Philippine DFA’s more cautious wing struggles to counter. Villanueva’s appeal for ‘calm’ diplomacy — and Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez’s parallel call to ‘cool’ the temperature — are not wrong in their diagnosis that the relationship cannot be defined solely by the maritime dispute. Economic ties, people-to-people connections, and regional stability all depend on some floor of functional engagement between Manila and Beijing. The Cebu talks of January 29, 2026 — the first direct bilateral contact in over a year — are evidence that both sides understand this at some level.
But the advocates of de-escalation face the Scarborough problem squarely: what is the mechanism by which a cooler temperature translates into Chinese behavioral change? The 2016 Arbitral Award, which ruled overwhelmingly in the Philippines’ favor on fourteen of fifteen points, was simply rejected by Beijing and has produced no modification of Chinese conduct. The ASEAN–China Declaration on Conduct of 2002 produced twenty years of largely fruitless negotiation. The transparency strategy, however confrontational, at least generates observable international pressure — and in the absence of enforcement mechanisms, reputational pressure is one of the few tools available to a middle power facing a great-power neighbor.
III. Singapore’s Structural Stake in the Dispute
Singapore is not a claimant in the South China Sea. It has no islands, reefs, or features at stake in the territorial dispute. And yet the current escalation between Manila and Beijing arguably poses more complex strategic challenges for Singapore than for any other non-claimant state in the region.
A. The Maritime Economy
Singapore’s position as the world’s premier transshipment hub is existentially dependent on the free and predictable flow of traffic through the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca. The numbers are stark: the Malacca Strait handles approximately 23.7 percent of global seaborne trade by volume, with a cargo value exceeding USD 2.8 trillion annually, and sees over 80,000 vessel transits per year. The South China Sea itself carries roughly 40 percent of global vessel traffic. Singapore’s port, which connects more than 600 ports across 123 countries and is projected to reach a sea freight market value of USD 7.87 billion in 2026, is the commercial nerve centre of this system.
A serious escalation in the South China Sea — defined not necessarily as open armed conflict but as a sustained period of heightened maritime confrontation that forces shipping companies to reroute, increase insurance premiums, or reduce frequency — would strike Singapore’s economy at its foundations. The city-state’s sea freight revenue, its bunkering industry, and its status as a financial and insurance hub for maritime commerce are all downstream consequences of stable sea lanes. The International Crisis Group has noted that the threshold for open conflict is gradually lowering as incidents normalize and red lines erode; each water-cannoning incident or dangerous aerial interception raises the ambient risk premium that insurers and shipping companies apply to South China Sea transits.
B. The ASEAN Chair Inheritance
Singapore assumes the ASEAN chair in 2027. The Philippines holds it through 2026 with an explicit, publicly stated ambition to conclude South China Sea Code of Conduct negotiations by year’s end. That ambition is almost universally assessed by analysts as implausible — the gap between Manila’s insistence on a legally binding agreement referencing UNCLOS and China’s preference for a non-binding, China-veto-equipped instrument is not closeable in a single year, particularly given the current state of bilateral relations.
Chatham House analysts have noted explicitly that Singapore, as the next ASEAN chair, would be ‘better placed to handle talks amicably’ given its good relationship with China and its diplomatic positioning as an economic partner rather than an adversarial claimant. This is simultaneously a compliment to Singapore’s diplomatic standing and a profound strategic burden. Singapore will inherit whatever political capital has been expended, whatever goodwill has been burned, and whatever institutional damage has been done during the Philippine chairmanship.
If the Philippines exhausts diplomatic energy on a failed CoC push in 2026, Singapore in 2027 will face a negotiating environment that is more entrenched, more adversarial, and more suspicious than the one it would have preferred. RSIS analyses have consistently noted that progress on the CoC is ‘unlikely to be concluded’ under the Philippine chairmanship, making it vital that Manila set its successor up for success by building confidence-building infrastructure — communication hotlines, joint search-and-rescue protocols, advance notice of military drills — rather than burning bridges over the binding versus non-binding impasse.
Singapore will inherit whatever political capital has been expended, whatever goodwill has been burned, and whatever institutional damage has been done during the Philippine chairmanship of ASEAN in 2026.
C. The Balancing Equation
Singapore’s official position on the South China Sea has always maintained a careful calibration: it supports freedom of navigation and overflight as a matter of international law and commercial interest; it affirms that disputes should be resolved in accordance with UNCLOS; and it refrains from taking explicit sides on territorial questions or from publicly censuring Chinese conduct in ways that would damage the bilateral relationship. This is not moral neutrality — Singapore has been clear that it takes the 2016 Arbitral Award seriously as a legal instrument — but it is strategic restraint, rooted in the recognition that Singapore’s leverage depends on its continued usefulness to both sides.
The current escalation directly stresses this equation. When Chinese diplomats publicly attack named Philippine officials, and when the Philippine Senate passes resolutions condemning Chinese diplomatic conduct, Singapore is forced into a position of ostentatious neutrality that is increasingly difficult to maintain credibly. Internally, Singaporean officials understand the Philippine position: the transparency strategy is legally and morally defensible, and the Scarborough precedent makes Philippine skepticism of quiet diplomacy entirely rational. But publicly endorsing that strategy — or even appearing to endorse it through insufficiently critical remarks about Chinese embassy conduct — would compromise Singapore’s utility as a future CoC mediator.
This creates a distinctive form of diplomatic tension that Singaporean analysts and policymakers understand well: the imperative to stay useful to both parties simultaneously imposes a kind of enforced silence at precisely the moments when the city-state’s voice might have the most influence.
IV. The Code of Conduct Conundrum: What Singapore Needs from 2026
The ASEAN–China Code of Conduct process is now in its third decade of formal existence, with the 2002 Declaration on Conduct of Parties providing its normative foundation, and formal negotiations opening in 2018 on the basis of a Single Draft Negotiating Text. The text’s leaked contents reveal the fundamental divide that has resisted resolution across multiple ASEAN chairmanships: China seeks a non-binding instrument with limited geographic scope that would exclude joint military activities with non-ASEAN powers (read: the United States) and would lack any ASEAN-led monitoring mechanism. ASEAN claimants — and particularly the Philippines — seek a legally binding agreement that references UNCLOS, covers the full extent of disputed waters, and contains meaningful enforcement provisions.
The Singapore-based Yusof Ishak Institute (ISEAS) has described this as a ‘fundamental divide’ that ‘continues to obstruct convergence on key provisions such as scope, definitions and enforcement.’ No previous ASEAN chair — Indonesia in 2023, Malaysia in 2025 — has succeeded in bridging it, and each successive failure erodes the credibility of the CoC process as a whole.
For Singapore’s 2027 chairmanship to have any prospect of success, 2026 needs to accomplish two things that are both within and beyond Manila’s control. Within its control: the Philippines can use its chairmanship to build the confidence-building architecture that creates conditions for substantive negotiation — the communication hotlines, the joint rescue protocols, the agreed definitions of self-restraint that represent the lower-hanging fruit of the CoC process. Beyond its control: China needs to see a diplomatic incentive to make meaningful concessions, and the current state of Sino-Philippine relations — with its public attacks on named officials, Senate resolutions, and persona non grata discussions — is not generating that incentive.
The Trump Variable
An additional layer of complexity is introduced by shifts in American foreign policy under the second Trump administration. Philippine and Chinese analysts have both noted that the uncertainty surrounding American security commitments — and the transactional character of the Trump administration’s engagement with alliances — creates a genuine recalibration incentive for both Manila and Beijing. The Cebu talks of January 29 were partly driven by both sides’ recognition that they could not rely on an indefinitely stable American security architecture to structure their bilateral relationship.
For Singapore, this creates an opening and a risk simultaneously. The opening: if both Manila and Beijing are recalibrating away from their most adversarial postures, Singapore’s role as a neutral convener becomes more rather than less valuable. The risk: if the Trump administration’s erratic engagement with Southeast Asian allies reduces the credibility of the US security umbrella, the power differential between China and the Philippines grows larger, reducing Manila’s negotiating leverage and making a CoC agreement on terms acceptable to ASEAN claimants even harder to achieve.
V. Singapore’s Strategic Options
Singapore’s formal diplomatic options in this situation are constrained by its own posture, but the constraints are not absolute. Several analytical frameworks illuminate the space available.
Active Quiet Diplomacy
Singapore has historically exercised outsized influence in ASEAN through what might be called ‘active quiet diplomacy’ — backstage mediation, carefully worded joint communiques, and the structural use of its convening power as a trusted neutral. The ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore’s premier regional think tank, operates as a genuine soft-power asset, providing analytical frameworks that shape regional policy conversations in ways that align with Singapore’s interests without direct political attribution. This approach has produced results in the past and remains Singapore’s primary instrument.
In the current context, active quiet diplomacy could translate into bilateral conversations with both Manila and Beijing that encourage the Philippines to pursue confidence-building measures rather than expending all diplomatic capital on the unachievable binding CoC, while signaling to China that its embassy’s conduct in Manila is counterproductive to the CoC process that Beijing claims to support in principle.
Economic Signaling
Singapore’s economic relationships with both China and the Philippines give it a form of structural leverage that it rarely employs explicitly. Singapore is one of China’s largest foreign investment sources and a critical node in Chinese financial and trading operations. The Philippines-Singapore economic relationship, while smaller in absolute terms, is significant and growing. A Singapore that frames CoC progress as a precondition for certain kinds of economic and financial facilitation — without ever stating this explicitly — would be exercising a form of conditionality that both parties understand.
Multilateral Architecture-Building
Singapore’s most durable contribution to the CoC process may lie not in brokering the binding-versus-non-binding argument but in building the technical and procedural infrastructure that makes any eventual agreement workable. Communication hotlines between coast guards, agreed incident-reporting protocols, joint search-and-rescue exercises, and standardized definitions of ‘self-restraint’ are all technically achievable without resolving the fundamental sovereignty questions. A Singapore-led effort to institutionalize these confidence-building measures during 2026 — potentially in coordination with the Philippine chairmanship — could create a floor of behavioral predictability that reduces the risk of miscalculation even in the absence of a formal CoC.
VI. Conclusion: The Price of Managed Ambiguity
The Philippine DFA’s appeal for ‘calm’ and ‘professional’ diplomatic exchanges on February 11, 2026, will likely accomplish little in the short term. The structural forces driving the escalation — Manila’s rational commitment to transparency, Beijing’s systematic resistance to accountability, and Washington’s uncertain engagement with its alliance commitments — are not amenable to rhetorical de-escalation requests.
But the diplomatic temperature between Manila and Beijing matters enormously to Singapore, in ways that extend well beyond the immediate bilateral relationship. The South China Sea Code of Conduct process, upon which Singapore will stake considerable diplomatic capital in 2027, is being shaped by the state of Sino-Philippine relations in 2026. The Scarborough Shoal lesson that haunts Manila’s calculations — that quiet diplomacy rewards Chinese non-compliance — is a direct indictment of the very approach that Singapore’s diplomatic model is built upon. If Manila’s transparent confrontationalism ultimately proves more effective at changing Chinese behavior than Singapore’s calibrated neutrality, the implications for the city-state’s broader strategic posture are profound.
The more likely near-term outcome is neither vindication for the transparency doctrine nor for managed ambiguity. Both approaches face structural limits against a China that regards its South China Sea position as a core national interest. The practical question for Singapore is how to use the 2026 Philippine chairmanship as a foundation rather than an obstacle — encouraging Manila to build the confidence-building architecture that will survive the CoC’s inevitable delay, while managing the risk that rhetorical escalation poisons the diplomatic well from which Singapore will need to draw in 2027.
For Singapore, the Philippines–China row is not a spectator sport. It is a pressure test of the managed ambiguity that has been the Lion City’s foreign-policy foundation for six decades.
Singapore’s foreign policy has always been premised on the conviction that small states survive and prosper by making themselves indispensable to larger powers — by being the place where deals get done, where legal disputes get adjudicated, where ships refuel and goods tranship and money moves. That model requires predictability, the rule of law, and functional diplomatic channels. All three are under pressure in the South China Sea in early 2026, and the Lion City has no easy options for reducing that pressure. What it does have is a track record of extraordinary diplomatic precision, institutional depth that no other ASEAN state can match, and a set of economic relationships that give it structural leverage even when its voice must remain publicly quiet.
Whether that is enough to navigate the most complex geopolitical moment the region has faced in a generation remains to be seen. What is certain is that the outcome of the Philippines–China rhetorical war, and the fate of the South China Sea Code of Conduct negotiations it is complicating, will shape Singapore’s strategic landscape for years to come.
Sources and References
Analysis draws on reporting and analysis from the following sources, current as of February 11, 2026:
Reuters; South China Morning Post; Foreign Policy; Chatham House (UK); International Crisis Group; RSIS (S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore); ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore; Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (CSIS); GMA News Online; The Manila Times; Philstar.com; CFR Global Conflict Tracker; Maritime Fairtrade; Splash247; Wilson Center.
Disclaimer: This document is an analytical report synthesising publicly available reporting and think-tank analysis. It does not represent the official position of any government or institution.