Transcript of President Tharman Shanmugaratnam’s remarks at the World Economic Forum Session: “Who Brokers Trust Now?” 21 January 2026, Congress Centre, Davos

Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post Global Affairs Columnist, Moderator: Mr President, on the rules-based order. Of course, the success of Singapore is, in a certain way, contingent on the functioning of the rules-based order. This is a country among much larger countries in your neighbourhood. You're at the hub of regional trade, and the rules-based order is essential for Singapore's success. At a moment now, when much is in question, when there is flux, what does that mean for Singapore, when we're seeing people suggest that maybe we do live in a might-makes-right world? What does that mean for Singapore?

President Tharman Shanmugaratnam: Let me start with what is in plain sight. We are seeing the disregard of the UN Charter and an erosion of the norms, conventions and trust that have been built up over 80 years.

But in many ways, our challenge now is more complex than it was in 1945. In 1945, a large part of the world was emerging from the devastation of the Second World War. And we had a dominant power with an expansive sense of enlightened self-interest, who oversaw the building of the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations, which laid the basis for a new, stable international order.

We don't have either of those conditions in place now. It will be tempting to think, therefore, that things have to get worse before they can get better, before we can reboot. But that would be too dangerous. The danger is that things may not just get worse, but we get a self-reinforcing decline into disorder, in other words, path dependence. And it's easy to see how that can happen. How polarisation domestically begets further polarisation, and can even become violent. How global rifts can widen and harden, and you get rivalry over whole stacks of industry, whole AI stacks. It's easy to see how financial fragility can lead to a gradual and then sudden loss of trust in reserve currencies, with instability globally as a result. How AI agents can go rogue, and how runaway misinformation and deep fakes can undermine trust in democracy itself. And it's easy to see how climate change, once the planet crosses critical tipping points, takes us into completely uncharted territory.

So we have to bend the trajectory and not wait to see how things play out in the hope that when things get more damaging, the world wakes up and we start building a new world order. That is too dangerous a path.

We start with what we have. And if you take a global perspective, we don't start with complete disadvantage. The old world order, or the world order we knew, has left us with gains that will not be lost. The vast majority of countries believe in the international rule of law. They also believe that collective problems require collective solutions, and everyone has to pitch in. The vast majority of people, even if they do not understand the science of climate change, know that the planet is closing in on us - everyone can see the droughts, the floods, the hurricanes, the shortages of water.

And the best surveys also show that the vast majority of people, across the world and even in the United States believe in the importance of global cooperation, and even compromise between nations, in order to serve national interests. The vast majority have not lost faith in global cooperation.

And very importantly, the surveys also show that in societies where people trust each other, domestically, there's also a higher degree of faith in international cooperation and international organisations.

So, we're starting with gains that were accumulated over 80 years and have not been lost. That's not a bad starting point.

What we have to do now, therefore, is to build Plan B. Not in a wide-eyed fashion - not with just with the idealism of wanting to do good for the world, although it's important that we should have that idealism - but a Plan B that recognises that even as national interests prevail, there's enough of an intersection between national interests and the global good. And that means building plurilateral alliances around the challenges that we face in common. April 2, 2025 and a whole host of other events over the last year have prompted greater momentum, greater urgency in these alliances. It was not by chance that Mercosur agreed to an FTA with the EU after 30 years of negotiation. Or that the EU and CPTPP are talking to each other with the aim of creating a very large alliance of countries around free trade and investment, and the norms that allow for growth and innovation to be spread. 

We now have to build up alliances of countries – small, medium-sized, and large powers as well - around areas of common interest. We do have a common interest in AI safety, in safety from a climate that is getting less liveable with each decade, and in open trade and investment to provide for growth and prosperity in the developed world, as well as for the large proportion of people in less advanced countries. There's so much common ground.

So, build on that - and move forward amongst a solid core of countries with enough motivation to want to go beyond what we've already agreed on in the multilateral institutions.

But as we build up the plurilateral alliances under Plan B, we should not repudiate Plan A, or multilateralism itself.  The global system still needs a centre of gravity in international institutions and the international rules and norms that have governed us, not perfectly, but well enough for 80 years. Do not undermine the rule of law. Do not undermine the most favoured nation principle and national treatment in the WTO. Do not undermine the Paris Agreement, which, even if it lacks enforcement, has led us to a much better place 10 years on than we were in 2015. We're still short of climate action, still need to do a lot more and with greater urgency, but we are in a better place.

We have to strengthen and reform the multilateral institutions. And they may need significant reform, including to the whole system of consensus-based decision-making that several international organisations have been beset by, which has prevented them from moving forward on critical areas of cooperation. So, build up the plurilateral alliances and use them as pathfinders to strengthen Plan A, to strengthen multilateralism itself.

 And let’s not be too tempted by the idea that multipolarity will suddenly appear and sort out the problems in the world. It can just as well be a more unstable world. Be careful what we wish for.

Moderator: Thank you for that, Mr President. In your earlier remarks, you talked about this kind of emerging flexible multilateralism or plurilateralism, and I see that especially for Singapore, which is in such a crowded neighbourhood. But if we accept that, perhaps there are some great powers that see the world differently now, they see spheres of influence. Singapore is also at the heart of US-China competition. How do you pair your desire for flexible multilateralism with the obvious geopolitical pressures that Singapore faces caught between the US and China?

President Tharman: I think the US and China will have to recognise that it's in their own interests, their own national interests, to accommodate each other. They will compete furiously in new technologies and for economic supremacy. That will not be without benefit for the rest of the world, because the innovations that are coming out of this competition, if distributed well globally, can lead to mass flourishing at a global level. But they will need to exercise more restraint in some areas, particularly where things can get out of control – the dangers of uncontrolled AI being an example. So competition with restraint is in their interest. I don't think it's beyond their leaderships, now and in the future, to recognize that.

On flexible multilateralism, on the way plurilaterals can act as pathfinders to strengthen the multilateral organizations, I would say we've got to go about this with some conviction. It's not just a defensive move, it’s not just because we've got our backs against the wall. We're actually trying to build something which is needed for whole new areas of the economy, e-commerce and cross-border digital services for example, for which the rules and common standards have to be put in place.

Achieving complete international consensus of these issues will take time. But groups of countries can come ahead. If we look at the WTO, 72 countries have already agreed on the Joint Statement Initiative on E-commerce, and quite quickly. Like-minded countries, large, medium-sized and small. There's a good chance that eventually we get a fuller consensus at the WTO.

But let me come back to something fundamental. It is significant that people who trust each other in their own countries have greater interest and faith in cooperation internationally. So if we want to build a resilient international order, if we want to build a decent world order, it has to start at home. It has to start with strengthening trust and the interest people take in each other, people across different socio-economic circumstances, and who make different contributions to shared prosperity.

Start with where people are - start with their hopes and their fears. What most people want is a good job, security in their careers, and the dignity of knowing that they're contributing.

That has to be at the centre of public policy in all our societies - providing good jobs in an era where technology can be a very powerful enabler but can also be a displacer. We cannot just wait and see how that plays out. We’ve got to act pre-emptively - through more effective skilling, more real-time feedback to ensure that skilling meets market demands. And by giving people the sense they are not on their own once they leave school and enter the workforce - there will be repeated opportunities to build up new skills. That has to be central.

Second, we have to pay more attention to those who lose out. Overall prosperity is extremely important – it’s important for everyone to be to see the ladders of progress that overall growth creates. But there will be people who lose out, because that's in the nature of economic competition and the creative destruction that comes with innovation. Don't let problems fester. If someone is displaced, or if a local community is displaced from work, address it quickly, through public-private sector cooperation to bring in new economic activities. Don't allow problems to fester - that, too, is a lesson of the last 20 to 30 years. Globalisation worked, it led to a remarkable increase in living standards everywhere, including in the most advanced nations, but it left pockets of people who were dislocated from jobs, and who were left on their own. The real lessons lay in domestic policy failure.

So we have to rebuild trust domestically, with everyone knowing that they can contribute to national prosperity, to have a better chance at building resilient international alliances for the global good.