The Weight of Small Nations

There is a particular kind of madness that visits people who leave good careers and spend the next two decades quietly wondering what if.

Mine arrived in 1996, when I joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a wide-eyed young officer convinced that I was about to move the world, one carefully worded communiqué at a time. It departed in 2001, when I left for the private sector and traded embassy receptions for boardrooms, talking points for pitch decks, and the quiet art of representing a small nation for the considerably louder art of selling things to people.

I do not regret the choice. But I never entirely stopped wondering.

The Weight of Small Nations is what that wondering looks like, given enough time, an overactive imagination, and, critically,  access to an artificial intelligence that can write prose with the patience of a saint and the stamina of someone who doesn’t need sleep.

The novel follows Romeo bin Razali, a fictional Bruneian diplomat who spent thirty years doing the kind of work that never appears in official records; back-channel negotiations, quietly brokered agreements, the careful cultivation of relationships that only become visible when they are needed in a crisis. He is not me. He is, if I am honest, a version of the person I might have become if I had stayed, filtered through thirty years of storytelling instinct and a writer’s useful tendency to make everything slightly more dramatic than it actually was.

The stories in this collection draw on real places, real periods of history, and real tensions; the South China Sea disputes, the Mindanao peace process, the particular loneliness of representing a country that most people, if pressed, could not locate on a map. What they do not draw on is classified information, because I left before I learned any, which is perhaps the most honest sentence in this entire book.

What they do draw on is this: I know what it feels like to be in a room where the important decisions are made by people who have already decided you are decorative. I know the particular diplomacy required to be taken seriously when you represent somewhere small. And I know, from lived experience, that the most consequential people in any negotiation are almost never the ones whose names appear in the final communiqué.

This book was written in collaboration with Claude, an AI developed by Anthropic. I directed the storylines. Claude wrote the sentences. It is, depending on your view of these things, either a fascinating experiment in human-AI creative partnership or simply the longest prompt I have ever written.

Either way, I think Romeo would have approved. He was, above all else, a practical man.

Reeda, Brunei Darussalam, 2026