ABSTRACT
In the early 2000s, the Middle East was not high on the list of Singapore’s priorities. Of late, however, a more purposeful engagement with the Gulf is evident. This chapter adopts an approach grounded in foreign policy analysis to analyze the extent to which Singapore’s engagement with the Gulf is shaped by security-related developments in the latter. It draws largely upon qualitative analysis, interviews, and quantitative data from sources in Singapore. The first section provides the relevant theoretical overview according to which domestic sources, in this case Singapore’s strategic culture of ‘vulnerability’, frames the conduct of foreign policy. The second section examines Singapore–Gulf relations along three pathways – public order, economic prosperity, and energy security – and the extent to which they are filtered by the city-state’s ‘vulnerability’. The third section concludes with some thoughts about the outlook for maintaining the momentum in relations between interlocutors on the fringes of Asia.
