StrategyUnit

This week begins the first East Asia Summit (EAS) with over 16 countries invited, representing “3 billion people and one-fifth of global trade“. As the Washington Post writes:

As proposed by Malaysia and championed by China, the summit was conceived as a way for the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to cooperate with China, Japan and South Korea — but not the United States — on security, social and economic problems. Many officials viewed it as a vehicle for Chinese leadership, making China the motor of an Asian bloc with a voice distinct from that of other Asia-Pacific groupings that include the United States.

Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea were some of the major nations invited to EAS. Russia was invited as well as an observer, making it all the more striking that the US wasnt.

Despite the growth in China’s clout in its region, the U.S. is still the de facto security guarantor of the region. While East Asia Summit, like ASEAN, will probably be mired by discord and inability to create concrete action, the fact that the U.S. is not part of the discussion in Kuala Lumpur is the ill-gotten fruit of our publicly voiced insecurity regarding China.

All this talk of China as the threat is driving China to play the game in Asia as zero-sum: its either the U.S. (pun intended) or China.

Given geography and culture, the East and South-East Asia is not the “natural” sphere of influence for the U.S. and we need to be reminded this. World War II gave our position in Asia, we should be careful not to squander it by driving China to carve its sphere and fight for influence at our expense.

Instead of containment in China, we should encourage tying China in to a mesh of pan-Asian institutions that will help China gain confidence in the region despite U.S. presence, while also constrain its range of maneuver.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Central Asia is a demonstration of China ability to create its own regional institutions as a tool to challenge the U.S. We need to build our own tool by putting China and the U.S. together in it.

Additionally, India is also looking to assert itself globally, we encourage and guide them on this process as partenrs, least they form their partnership with states that hold interests contrary to ours.

Former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong of Singapore was quoted as saying : “We have little choice but to construct a new architecture for East Asia…If East Asia does not coalesce, it will lose out to the Americas and Europe…The key question is not whether East Asia will integrate. It is how quickly and the form East Asian regionalism will assume.”

Indeed, Gok Chok Tong is correct and it is even more the reason the U.S. needs to be able to partipate in these dicussion (EAS specifically and the future of Asia in general). We cannot ignore a region as sizeable and vibrant as Asia.

Someone needs to ask why what’s going on in the State Department and why isnt President Bush at the EAS?