Suns in the East will outshine the West

Suns in the East will outshine the West

Tom Plate
The Straits Times
Asia News Network
Singapore

From the perspective of the Atlantic coast, Asia seems a very,
very long plane ride and several colossal conceptual leaps away.
Europe, on the other hand, is but a half dozen or so time zones
distant and, for some reason, thoroughly less complicated.

The inevitable result is that Asia has played second fiddle to
Europe in the American foreign-policy mind for as long as anyone
can recall.

No more, asserts Foreign Affairs editor James Hoge. America's
east coast is getting over its Eurocentrism. He agrees that the
center of global gravity is irrevocably and dramatically moving
from the West to the East. "Economic power, political power,
military power is moving to Asia," says Hoge, "and the old order
will have to make adjustments with India and China coming down
the road at a fairly fast clip. Why, even the smaller surging
nations of Asia are bigger than the bigger ones in Europe".

Hoge, after three decades of newspaper journalism, became
editor of Foreign Affairs in 1992. He will address the Paul H.
Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins
University next Wednesday.

Jim (an old friend) offered an advance peek at his speech
during a chat in his book-lined office at the Council of Foreign
Relations headquarters in midtown Manhattan.

Central to his thinking is that the historic shift to the East
may well prove very bumpy. Geopolitical paradigm shifts, he
warns, "seldom occur peacefully". The rise of Germany and Japan
in the early 20th century was resisted by the imperial order of
the time, triggering colossal military catastrophe. "The
transformation now underway is bigger, more complex and more
unfamiliar," he warns.

China's economy, he notes, will probably surpass Germany's in
less than 10 years and overtake Japan's in less than 20. Suppose
a new generation of leadership in both giants was to bury the
historic hatchet and combine in alliance against the West?

On the other hand, he also notes, Asia has not recently
witnessed a fully enabled China and Japan cohabiting together on
the same Asian continent at the same time. Suppose the two giants
were to choose to have it out militarily at some point? This
would devastate Asia politically -- and the world economically.

And that's not even the full enormity of the new Asian
paradigm. Singapore's Kishore Mahbubani, Permanent Representative
to the United Nations, and Minister for Trade and Industry George
Yeo have likened the new emerging order to a solar system that
now features two powerful suns -- China and the United States.

But Hoge envisions a third: India moving slowly but surely
into the picture as a global solar superpower. In his speech, he
will cite a Goldman Sachs prediction of a possible Indian
economic eclipse of China in the next half century.

Already the major nations of Asia account for most of the
world's foreign exchange reserves, he points out, and thus
finance most of the U.S. current account deficit, which is now
gigantic: "The bottom line is that we face an enormous
transformation of power, attended by unavoidable dislocations,"
he says.

The U.S. response to the new reality seems more old-style --
mainly with military moves -- than new-age global.

A key element appears to be an emerging policy of "soft
containment" for growing China. American bases in Central Asia
look awfully large and unnecessary, unless the point is to deter
China; the new missile-shield commitment from Japan (at
Washington's intense behest) looks awfully expensive and
unnecessary, unless the point is China (and, of course, North
Korea); and the intensified U.S. military cooperation with India
would seem awfully sudden and unnecessary, unless it is fashioned
to seal off the Indian Ocean and the Malacca Straits from Chinese
influence. "If you were a Chinese strategist," he says, "what
would you think?"

It is possible to quibble with Hoge's hunches here and there.
India, with its huge internal Muslim population, surely has to
come to a stable settlement with neighboring Pakistan before it
can even begin to think of an alliance with the U.S. against
China -- or with China against the U.S.

Japan's economic recovery could stall and the Koizumi
government's Iraq involvement could blow up in Tokyo's face (as
the hostage psychodrama suggests), throwing the Japanese back
into its pacifist protectionist shell.

And any sentient recollection of Chinese history should serve
to fill us all with extreme humility about making any predictions
about China, which retains, it seems to me, a genetic ability to
self-destruct internally at any time.

Even so, Hoge, as a certified foreign policy intellectual, is
trying to make a serious contribution to reorienting American
foreign policy in the direction of what used to be called the
Orient. His effort could prove helpful and timely for an America
that seems lately to have made some bad calls and shockingly
misconceived policy turns.