Tharman says smaller states can help rebuild trust as global order fractures

President Tharman Shanmugaratnam has made the case through 2026 that smaller and middle-sized countries, Singapore among them, still have a part to play in holding international cooperation together at a time when the post-war rules-based order is under visible strain — a role often summed up as bridge-building between a divided set of major powers.

Tharman, a former senior economic policymaker who became Singapore's ninth president in 2023 and has chaired international panels on issues from water to financial stability, has used a run of high-profile appearances to lay out how a small, open nation sees a more fractured world.

At a World Economic Forum session in Davos titled "Who Brokers Trust Now?" on 21 January 2026, he framed the problem starkly, pointing to "the disregard of the UN Charter and an erosion of the norms, conventions and trust" that had been built up over 80 years. He argued that the danger was not a simple cycle of conditions worsening before they improve, but a self-reinforcing slide into disorder if the drift went unchecked.

Rather than counsel despair, Tharman has stressed that the world still has assets to build on, including broad public support in many countries for international law and cooperation. His prescription, which he has described as a kind of "Plan B," centres on plurilateral coalitions — groupings of like-minded countries, large, medium and small — that act together on shared challenges such as artificial-intelligence safety, climate change and keeping trade open.

A role for smaller states

Crucially, he has argued, such coalitions should be designed to strengthen multilateral institutions rather than replace them. He has also contended that most pressing issues no longer require leadership from a single dominant power, and that small and medium-sized countries can contribute alongside the United States and China rather than merely waiting on the two giants.

On the US-China relationship itself, Tharman has repeatedly said the two powers should compete with restraint, and that a stable relationship between them — technologically and economically — would be hugely beneficial to the rest of the world. He has cautioned Singapore and other small states against being intimidated into picking sides.

Diplomacy in practice

That outlook has been visible in Singapore's presidential diplomacy during the year. In July 2026, ahead of and during a state visit to Malaysia, Tharman urged deeper integration between the two neighbours as the global economy fragments, describing their partnership as resting on trust built over six decades and warning that it must never become purely transactional.

In October he travelled to Thailand around the 2026 IMF-World Bank Group annual meetings, where he took part in a high-level advisory discussion on jobs, before making a state visit to Sweden from 17 to 21 October — the first by a Singapore president — which also marked the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Tharman has tied the external picture back to conditions at home, arguing that trust within societies underpins public support for international cooperation. Sustaining that trust, he has suggested, depends on delivering good jobs, continual skilling and support for people displaced by economic change — the domestic foundations, in his telling, of a country able to engage confidently abroad.

For a small, trade-dependent state wedged between larger powers, the stakes in that argument are direct. By positioning itself as a convenor and an honest broker rather than a partisan, Singapore hopes to preserve the space it needs to trade, invest and speak with credibility in a world where, as its president has warned, the old guarantees can no longer be taken for granted.