It Takes Everyone to Succeed, and Only One to Fail
What a defense forum in Singapore reveals about every powerless coordinator — from a hub between great powers to the PMO inside your company.
The 23rd Shangri-La Dialogue closed in Singapore last week. Forty-four countries, more than fifty defense-minister-level delegates, and from the United States, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the commander of Indo-Pacific Command. By the measure of scale and spectacle, it was a grand affair.
But for a multilateral forum like this, scale and spectacle are the least important measures of success.
Hosting an international forum is not hard. You fund it, send the invitations, set a respectable agenda, and countries will send people. The group photos, the closing communiqué, the corridor pleasantries — none of this amounts to success. It only proves the meeting took place.
The real test is a single one: did the major powers the forum exists to bring together each send their actual decision-makers, at a level that matched?
By that test, this year’s Dialogue fell short. China’s defense minister was absent for the second year running. The delegation was led by a professor from the National Defense University and made up largely of military scholars, and the customary China session was cancelled. For a venue whose central draw is the interaction between the US and China, once the Chinese decision-making level is missing, then no matter how striking the American remarks, how active the ASEAN mediation, or how complete the closing consensus, on the one thing that mattered — the US and China meeting substantively in this room — it had already come up empty.
The major powers never needed this venue
Why is “whether the major powers send matching decision-makers” an absolute threshold for judging the forum’s success?
Because the major powers already have dedicated, direct channels between them. They do not need a forum like this to broker the connection.
The clearest evidence took place in the very same window. The Dialogue ran in Singapore from May 29 to 31. And on May 28 and 29, the US and Chinese militaries held a separate meeting in Hawaii: the 2026 working-group meeting of the China-US Military Maritime Consultative Agreement. Under this standing bilateral mechanism, the two militaries assessed how the code for safe air and maritime encounters had been implemented, and discussed concrete measures to improve frontline safety. The substance, in other words, was real working business.
Set the two meetings side by side and the logic is plain. In the same week that defense ministers were taking turns at the podium in Singapore, making public statements, the actual professional issues between the US and Chinese militaries had already been handled through the bilateral channel in Hawaii. One was a public stage facing an audience. The other was a working session behind closed doors. The substance always happens in the latter.
The same holds at the highest level. The strategic communication between the US and China was completed in Beijing two weeks earlier, where the two heads of state reached consensus on building a constructive and stable strategic relationship. What Hegseth said at the Dialogue about the US-China relationship was, in essence, a restatement of the tone set in Beijing.
The point is evident. For the two parties that matter, the US and China, substantive communication happens through direct channels — at the head-of-state level, and at the professional military level. Singapore’s multilateral stage is an optional stop, one you may attend or skip. The major powers come as a courtesy to the host and as a show of support for multilateralism, not out of necessity.
A connector’s value is always conferred. It rests on each party’s provisional judgment that “routing this through you is smoother, more dignified,” and that judgment can be withdrawn at any time. The connector itself holds no leverage to demand that the major powers extend it.
This is exactly the PMO inside a large company
Anyone who has run a project inside a large company will recognize this situation. It is the PMO, the project management office.
The PMO owns no business unit. It controls no P&L. It cannot decide anyone’s bonus or anyone’s exit. It has no native base of power. Its entire value lies in coordinating the business units and support functions to push a cross-departmental project to completion.
There is an easily overlooked premise here: the business units, and the business and support functions, are not natural adversaries who cannot work together. Given enough willingness, they have every channel and every ability to communicate directly. The PMO’s role is never to make impossible collaboration possible. It is to make what could already be done go more smoothly, more efficiently.
In other words, the PMO is organizational lubricant, not an indispensable bridge.
A connector like Singapore has value for the same reason: letting the major powers meet on neutral, multilateral ground carries more political dignity and a more multilateral look than meeting privately. What it offers is not the meeting itself, but the dignified dressing around the meeting. It too is lubricant, not a necessity.
It takes everyone to succeed, and only one to fail
Whether I was a consultant on the vendor side in my early years, or later a PMO on the client side, at every project’s closing celebration I would make a point of thanking each department for its support. This was not hollow courtesy. Because I knew one thing well: for a project to succeed, every power-holding party has to lift it together; for it to fail, only one of them has to decide not to cooperate.
This is a structural asymmetry. Success is a sufficient condition that must be met in full — you have to assemble the genuine investment of every power-holder, with none missing. Failure is a necessary condition that needs only a single point to hold — let any one power-holding department decide to let go, and the project collapses. And they need not oppose it openly, need not commit any error. They need only happen to have a higher priority at the critical moment, and delay or disengage in a fully compliant way when their cooperation is required. The coordinator, holding no power, is left helpless, with no one even to hold accountable, because the other side has done nothing procedurally wrong.
Map this logic onto the Dialogue and it is accurate to the point of cruelty. For a forum like this to succeed, all the major powers must want to attend, send real representatives, and take it seriously, all at once — an exacting condition. To discount its value, only one power of sufficient weight has to treat it coolly. China did not need to boycott it openly. It only had to send a delegation of scholars, with the defense minister absent, and the forum’s core value was already shaken, the grand affair already reduced to form. Singapore could do nothing about it.
Neutrality is the foundation; believing yourself indispensable is the dead end
The PMO’s greatest asset is staying neutral. The moment one business unit judges it to be partial, leaning toward another side, that unit will put up its guard and move to sideline the PMO.
The PMO’s most dangerous illusion is mistaking the dignity others extend to it for evidence that it is indispensable. Once it begins to overstep, convinced that without it the business cannot run, the parties respond in the simplest, most direct way. After all, they could always deal with each other directly.
The same goes for a multilateral hub. When a hub is judged by a major power to be no longer neutral, the power answers with action: lower the level of attendance, stay away, or set up its own table elsewhere. The hub has no counter to this.
Accurate self-knowledge is a virtue
So why can some connectors not master this balance? Because it is a demanding art: to win the genuine acceptance of the power-holders, and at the same time hold fast to neutrality, captured by no one. Whether you can master it depends on the complexity of the environment in which you were trained.
Position can be conferred from outside. Geography gave Singapore its position on the strait; an organizational appointment gives a person the PMO title. But the capability to wield that position will never arrive automatically with the title. It can only be forged through repeated rounds of contest, in an environment of high complexity where many interests are fiercely entangled.
Here one must choose the right benchmark. Singapore’s complexity should not be compared sideways against other hub economies — that is a contest among equals. It should be measured against the very objects it is trying to balance: against China, against the United States. Is Singapore complex?
A city-state of just over five million, with no hinterland and no strategic depth, an economy heavily dependent on entrepôt trade and finance, an internal landscape of interests that is relatively simple. Against China: 1.4 billion people, the weighing of interests across dozens of provinces, a complete industrial system, the sediment of several thousand years of civilization. Against the United States: fifty states, the tension between federal and state power, the contest of two parties, a web of interests spanning the globe. In internal complexity, Singapore and these two giants are simply not of the same order.
And yet what it must balance and navigate are precisely these two players, whose internal complexity exceeds its own by orders of magnitude. The major powers possess a training ground the small state cannot provide. This is no fault of Singapore’s. It is a fate determined by size. A city-state of five million was never meant to, and never could, possess the depth of governing complexity of a great power.
Look around the world and the other connectors face the same situation. Every small economy that took a hub position by virtue of geography and timing is in the same place: the position came from circumstance, but the capability to wield it can only be cultivated in great-power-scale complexity, and they are, by nature, short of that scale of training. The mismatch between position and capability is their shared and deep structural fragility.
Needed, not indispensable
So the PMO, the multilateral connector, and every middle coordinator without real power, all walk the same line between life and death: are they needed, or do they believe themselves indispensable?
Their value is real, but it is conferred from outside, an addition rather than a foundation. Every success they have comes not because they conquered anyone, but because every power-holder capable of sinking them chose, this time, to hold back. The moment such a coordinator misreads this collective goodwill as “it has to be me” and begins to overstep, it is destined to be bypassed, sidelined, and finally shown to be dispensable.
The mature coordinator stays clear-eyed about its own place.
In February, I wrote that a company’s regional headquarters is, in essence, a transfer station, one that the AI era will eventually route around with an end-to-end direct flight. The Dialogue now shows the same logic projected onto the level of nations, onto geopolitics. Only this time, what routes around the hub is not AI, but the direct channels the major powers already hold.
A coordinator’s fragility is the fate written into the position itself: its existence always depends on whether those with real power are willing to need it. A connector, whether a PMO or a nation, faces its most dangerous moment not when it comes under attack, but when it begins to believe the world cannot do without it.