Asia is in a state of strategic flux. That was the single most important message coming out of this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue (SLD 2012) in Singapore, organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Seeking to provide an element of stability to this flux, and inject a measure of certainty to an uncertain world, the United States offered some hard numbers. The US will tilt the present 50:50 balance in its deployment of defence capability between the Atlantic and the Pacific to a new 60:40 distribution in favour of the Indo-Pacific, the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, told SLD 2012.