Foreign Secretary Speech: Diplomacy in the Digital Age
Foreign Secretary David Lammy delivered a speech on diplomacy in the digital age whilst in Singapore.
It’s great to be here today.
As you have heard, I recently marked twenty five years as a member of Parliament and this week one year as Foreign Secretary. It’s a pleasure to visit your great country following your sixtieth birthday as a nation.
Whenever I’ve come to Singapore and the wider ASEAN region, I’m struck by the innovative spirit, the creativity and the optimism.
Sixty years ago, Prime Minister Harold Wilson talked of the “white heat of technology” transforming British society and industry.
Today, the whole world is being radically reconfigured by technology, but nowhere faster, or more successfully, than here.
I’m particularly pleased to be here after my second ASEAN foreign ministers meeting in Malaysia.
In Laos last year, I promised to reconnect Britain to the Indo-Pacific and that is well underway.
In just over a year, I’ve made five visits spanning ten countries to the region. I’ve no doubt this will rise during my time in this job.
The Indo-Pacific matters to the UK. ASEAN will be the world’s fastest-growing economic bloc over the next decade. Your investments into Britain like Malaysian firm SMD Semiconductor’s new R&D hub in Wales, your market of 700 million consumers are a huge part of our growth ambitions.
Over the past year, we have been delivering on our promise to bring our economies closer together. Our CPTPP membership now ratified, our free trade agreement with India now signed our Industrial and Trade Strategies now published all speak to a hugely ambitious future for Britain in the Indo-Pacific.
But we want to go much further. We’re working with ASEAN on their Power Grid and economic resilience.
We support CPTPP widening, deepening, and starting dialogues with trading blocs like ASEAN and the EU.
We are exploring other agreements, too, like a deeper FTA with South Korea or accession to the Digital Economic Partnership Agreement which Singapore co-founded.
Today’s ‘digital trade’ will tomorrow simply be ‘trade’ and Britain is committed to making it faster, cheaper and easier.
As you in Singapore know very well this region is the crucible for global security.
Partner countries like Britain must stand up for an open, stable and rules-based international system because our region’s security and your region’s security are inextricably linked.
Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine drove market turbulence in Asia.
Any major supply chain disruption in Asia could push prices up in Britain.
If we have learnt one lesson over the past decade, it is that economic security does not respect borders.
That is why Britain’s new National Security Strategy recommitted to the vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region.
Our Carrier Strike Group recently sailed through your waters – a deployment involving twelve other nations.
We’re deepening our many regional security partnerships including AUKUS and the Five Power Defence Arrangements.
HMS Prince of Wales, as we’ve heard, is participating in Exercise Bersama Lima in September and the Malaysian chair kindly invited me to the ASEAN Regional Forum just yesterday where I underlined British support for ASEAN centrality and our growing cooperation against transnational crime and illicit finance.
In Singapore, you have proven over generations that it is not size which determines success it is strategic clarity. This is true of technology more than any other area.
Singapore has shown what’s possible when digital innovation is matched with long-term thinking and national purpose.
Back in 1981, when most of us were still working out what a computer was, your leaders set up a National Computerisation Committee.
In 2014, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong launched the whole-of-government Smart Nation initiative. Then in 2019, Teo Chee Hean unveiled a National AI Strategy.
Each time, your leaders were ahead of the game. Each time there was a broader lesson.
Singapore didn’t get ahead by throwing money at the private sector and hoping for the best.
Instead, you built serious public capability like SingPass, thanks to deep technical expertise inside government and investments in areas like compute and data infrastructure.
Starting in this job, I said that Britain needed to do more listening and less lecturing. A huge part of my trip this week has been to listen and, I hope, learn lessons on how we can pursue a similarly long-term strategy embracing technology.
That vision must include specific focus on the intersection of AI and diplomacy.
This is not yet a staple of foreign ministry and foreign ministers’ discussions at least in my experience.
But I believe that unless we lift our heads above the rat-race of crises and summits and examine the longer-term trends reshaping our world we will be boiled like the proverbial frog.
AI is not just the next rung in the technological ladder. It will deliver a paradigm shift in the distribution and exercise of power.
It will redefine how nations project influence how threats emerge and how we defend ourselves. It will therefore transform how diplomacy is conducted.
As Prime Minister Wong said earlier this year: “The once-rising tide of global cooperation that defined the past decades is giving way to one of growing competition and distrust. As a result, the world is becoming more fragmented and disorderly.”
There is much evidence of emerging technology catalysing the deterioration of both domestic and international norms.
AI is at the spearhead of hybrid threats like disinformation. It is not enough for responsible states to complain about others’ reckless behaviour.
If we do not invest in gaining technological edge then our influence will inevitably decline.
So today I want to outline a more hopeful vision of a sovereign, AI-enabled foreign policy.
I am proud of the role British diplomacy played at the Bletchley AI Safety Summit, our creation of the AI Security Institute, our plans for a new counter-hybrid taskforce in the FCDO to ready us for this new age.
Pleased also to see our work with Singapore in areas such as Responsible AI in the Military Realm and with ASEAN on AI for development.
But there has been little discussion between Britain and partners in the Indo-Pacific and beyond on how to use AI and advanced technology to make our diplomacy more effective.
I am determined to address this gap as Foreign Secretary, bringing AI to the centre of the FCDO’s policy machine.
Like most foreign ministries, too many Foreign Office practices have changed little over the past half century. But the old levers of government- briefings, memos, lengthy debates on drafting- are too slow and cumbersome for the pace of modern statecraft.
In an age of ever-accelerating speed and complexity we need the tools to match.
Let me be clear: AI will obviously not solve foreign policy.
It will not eliminate risk, nor remove the need for careful human judgement and the ability of people to build trusting relationships, as I have been doing with ASEAN partners this week.
Diplomacy in 2025 needs machine speed and a human touch. It can help us to make better decisions amidst rising uncertainty.
It can improve our ability to detect early signals of crisis, to simulate the likely effects of policy choices and to respond with speed and confidence.
Imagine for a moment an AI-powered unit at the heart of a foreign ministry. That could catalyse patterns of military movement, energy flows, and online narratives, model how a diplomatic crisis in one part of the world will have ripple effects elsewhere, red-team our response to a crisis – attacking our own policies before others can. Or flag emerging risks that human analysts might miss, especially when they emerge in grey zones favoured by adversaries…
These capabilities are not science fiction. They are already being employed.
The United States’ DARPA and KAIROS projects already simulate complex political developments and anticipate conflict escalation.
Estonia’s STRATCOM Centre uses AI-enabled systems to detect disinformation campaigns in real time.
Of course, Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry uses predictive analytics to flag risks to critical supply chains.
The question before us is not whether AI will shape foreign policy. It is who will shape it, and how.
In the British Foreign Office, this Government is investing £290 million in reforming our Department, helping to equip our teams with the capabilities and technologies that the modern era demands.
But outside of the United States and China, no country has the scale to deliver all the capabilities we need independently.
My call today is therefore for more collaboration, more AI diplomacy within a perimeter of values.
I want partners such as Britain and Singapore to align standards, share tools and develop models that reflect our shared principles.
Deep bilateral partnerships will be at the core of Britain’s approach. For us, our special relationship with the United States will remain foundational rooted in particular on our deep security links.
With the European Union, we can pursue AI cooperation through the prism of foreign policy and security, not just regulation, and I will be discussing this with Kaja Kallas as part of our recently agreed Security and Defence Partnership.
With India through the ‘Technology Security Initiative’ we agreed last year, we will focus collaboration more sharply in critical and emerging technologies.
And with other Indo-Pacific partners I hope that we can build on initiatives like the UK-ASEAN AI Innovation Summit later this year and extend cooperation to AI-enabled foreign policy.
I said that you in Singapore have shown the power of long-term thinking. The importance of a long-term vision, and I hope we can apply that same approach to breaking down the silos between foreign policy and technology.
We live in a volatile world. Technology is reshaping our societies, making power more diffuse.
Nations like Britain and Singapore need to equip ourselves with the tools to navigate these shifts and that means fusing AI and diplomacy, focusing on a long view of change and doubling down on our shared interests.
Thank you.