Commentary
Sometimes it’s good to get out of town and gain a new perspective on things. In my case, I got out of the United States entirely—to Singapore, in fact, where I recently attended a conference addressing the “lessons of the Russia-Ukraine war.”
From the standpoint of Southeast Asia, the war has had several ramifications. In the first place, it demonstrates the reality that conventional conflict is not beyond the realm of impossibility. This is a particularly important point as policy elites in many Southeast Asian nations had come to believe that wars—or at least large-scale conventional wars—were no longer fought between civilized nations. There was always the expectation that diplomacy and rationality in international relations would ultimately prevail….