America Incorporated

The composition of the United States' business delegations visiting Asia in recent weeks and the messages the missions have conveyed show an invigorated America Incorporated undertaking a concerted campaign to win business contracts.

That means creating jobs back home.

The missions, such as the high-powered delegation led by Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown to China recently and the one in Jakarta early this month, represent the implementation of a foreign policy that focuses on helping win deals for American businessmen.

The active participation of foreign affairs officials in U.S. business missions clearly shows that the U.S. government is serious about pursuing what President Bill Clinton proclaimed in the middle of last year as a post-Cold War foreign policy that uses trade as its leading edge.

That emphasis seems realistic as the U.S. has been trading increasingly with Asia. For example, its two-way trade with the ASEAN countries alone has exceeded US$60 billion a year and this trend points to a steady rise as more of the Asian economies continue their robust growth.

The national export strategy, which was formulated by the Clinton administration last year, has thus become prominent in America's foreign policy. The strategy, among other things, lists Indonesia, China, South Korea, India and several other countries as big emerging markets. It also identifies telecommunications, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, information technology, medical equipment, infrastructure and environmental technology as major emerging sectors. These emerging markets and sectors are being targeted for concerted U.S. export promotion.

The question, though, particularly to the countries in Southeast Asia, is whether that foreign policy will compromise America's crusade for human rights and democracy, which have become increasingly important in the U.S. public agenda in the post-Cold War era. If the approach the U.S. government used to settle its bone of contention regarding the human rights issue in China in June is a reliable indication, more tradeoffs for its economic interests may be on the horizon.

Further down the line, we may also expect a more pragmatic attitude on the part of the U.S. towards Indonesia's records in workers' right protection, which are still being assessed in connection with the pending review of its continued access to the U.S. Generalized System of Preferences trade privileges.

The U.S. government may have realized that without significant involvement in the region's economy, its leverage to influence political matters will be severely limited. That is especially relevant for Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, whose self-confidence has been rising along with their greatly impressive rates of economic growth.

But as the U.S. becomes increasingly involved in the Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and consequently becomes more aware of the importance of the region to the revitalization of its economy, it is expected to profess a higher sense of understanding about the region's great complexity and divergent interests.

Such an understanding will not, however, mean that the U.S. government should condone blatant human rights violations in the region such as the military shootings of unarmed civilians. Rather, it should have a better perspective regarding the quality of democracy in the Asia-Pacific area.

The U.S. should live with the reality that authoritarian governments, however offensive they might be to the American sense of democracy, are not automatically bad for countries encountering potential instability from their multiethnic and multi-religion populations.