For many U.S. allies, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is the last of the Trump administration's so-called grown-ups in the room. So at Asia's main annual security forum he got a warm reception for his firm defense of the rules-based order the U.S. helped to build after World War II.
Increasingly, though, Mattis' reassurance is not enough. The U.S. — as much as China — is seen as a threat to that system, undermining the very solutions the retired Marine Corps general offered to counter Beijing's rule breaking in the South China Sea.
On Sunday, tiny Singapore, one of the United States' most like-minded partners in the region, drew a direct equivalence between the U.S. and China. Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen marked the two global powers as nations that "are in fact changing the rules of the international order."