The second, more well developed type of country-level Omani-enmeshment has been led by Singapore and Thailand, where policymakers have tried to turn the geopolitical reality of great power penetration to their benefit. These two states have elevated national goals of diversifying bilateral relations with major powers by promoting them as integral elements of policies to manage regional stability. Such bilateral relations are seen as “building blocks” toward the larger aim of opening up, tying down, and binding a variety of major players in the region. Singapore’s limited size has forced the island-state to base its larger regional security strategy “principally on borrowing political and military strength from extraregional powers.” Singapore has carefully built upon its strategic location at the crossroads of vital sea-lanes between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. As discussed above, it has leveraged its status as the most open economy in the region to negotiate inaugural free trade agreements with all the major powers, as another means to deepen major countries’ economic stakes in the island and the region. At the same time, it tries to “make itself
valuable to the major powers”—through the provision of military facilities and strategic cooperation with the United States, for instance, and by cultivating the image of being an interlocutor between China and the United States—such that “they would feel a stake in Singapore’s prosperity, stability, and security.”
In addition, Singapore has promoted military-to-military relations with major powers in the form of joint exercises with the United States, exchanges
with China, and joint naval and air exercises with India.