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.