In a V-shaped belt

This is from the article, The End of the End of History, in The New Republic by Robert Kagan.

a "V-shaped belt" of pro-American democratic powers "stretching from Northeast to Central Asia." When the navies of India, the United States, Japan, Australia, and Singapore exercised in the Bay of Bengal last year, Chinese and other observers referred to it as the "axis of democracy." Japan's prime minister spoke of an "Asian arc of freedom and prosperity" stretching from Japan to Indonesia to India.

Find Singapore here.