China’s Ministry of National Defense announced on Tuesday that the Type 054A frigate Honghe will conduct a joint navigation exercise with an Indonesian navy frigate in waters east of Taiwan in mid-August. The stated content of the exercise is communications drills and underway replenishment. No dates, no coordinates, no route.

On the military ledger, that is close to nothing. Two frigates steaming in company, passing signals, practising a replenishment approach. Junior officer work. The Honghe entered service in 2022 with the Eastern Theater Command and the 054A is the most numerous frigate in the PLA Navy, which is to say Beijing did not send anything it considers precious.

Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew described his country’s strategic situation as that of a small nation living in a dangerous neighborhood, whose survival depends on making itself indispensable to every major power simultaneously. His successors have maintained this framework with considerable sophistication. In the context of the Taiwan Strait, it produces a position that is carefully calibrated to avoid giving either Washington or Beijing grounds to treat Singapore as aligned with the other: Singapore maintains deep security cooperation with the United States, hosts American naval vessels at Changi Naval Base, allows American surveillance aircraft to operate from Paya Lebar Air Base, and simultaneously maintains an economic and diplomatic relationship with China that it regards as equally essential to its prosperity and security.

Vietnam fought China in 1979. The two-month border war, triggered by Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to remove the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge government, cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides and ended without a clear military result. Vietnam held its positions. China withdrew. The war left a deep imprint on Vietnamese strategic culture: the understanding that China is a permanent neighbor with permanent interests in Vietnamese subordination, and that resistance — rather than accommodation — is the posture that Vietnamese sovereignty requires.