Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
 https://www.ft.com/content/0c20823d-2d5f-435e-aec4-269dbe5dafb4

 Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong recently managed what few other global leaders would be able or willing to do: travel to China and publicly praise a US-led Asian initiative. “Asia should always remain an open region,” Lee said at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan. “As Asian countries develop co-operation among ourselves, we should also cultivate our relations with the US, Europe and other parts of the world.” That Lee commended the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — a trade initiative intended to reassert US engagement in the region with an alternative to Beijing’s economic statecraft — at one of China’s largest annual international conferences pleased many American policymakers, said one US official based in Singapore who asked to remain anonymous. The event underscored the level of comfort that Singapore, one of Washington’s most important non-treaty allies in Asia, has attained with its long-term partner in a new phase of heightened Sino-US competition. The city-state carefully balances its economic relationship with China and its reliance on the US for security. But Singapore has become more active in deepening its defence ties with the US over the past several years, one of the only south-east Asian countries to do so aside from the Philippines, despite its friendly relations with Beijing and a recent influx of people and wealth from mainland China, risking tensions with its largest trading partner. In March, the US Air Force-operated RQ-4 Global Hawk, a stealth aircraft known for its surveillance capabilities and capacity to transmit time-sensitive targeting details, was revealed to have been deployed on a short-term basis from Singapore’s Changi airport.