As an Asian Century Is Planned, U.S. Power Stays in the Shadows

As an Asian Century Is Planned, U.S. Power Stays in the Shadows

By SETH MYDANS
Published: December 13, 2005

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec. 12 - The focus was on Myanmar Monday as a regional summit meeting began here, but the broader view was on the evolving shape of Asia as economies grow and alliances shift in the decades to come.

When the 10 leaders of the Association of South East Asian Nations gathered for their annual meeting, they made their strongest demand yet for political and human rights reform in Myanmar.

"Enough of talking," Foreign Minister Syed Hamid of Malaysia told reporters after the meeting. "We want to see some action." He said he would soon travel to Myanmar as a representative of the association, known as Asean.

"We want to see something very tangible, like perhaps the release of the detained people," he said, in a clear reference to the pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest.

At the same time, more leaders were arriving for the first East Asia summit meeting on Wednesday, where 16 nations will inaugurate a broader association whose ambition is balanced by its lack of immediate substance.

It will be the largest association of Asian leaders - representing nearly half the world's population - as well as the first to include China and India together. It will also be the first in postwar times to exclude the most powerful participant in regional affairs, the United States.

The vision of the East Asia summit talks, as conceived by Mahathir Mohamad, then prime minister of Malaysia, who proposed it almost two decades ago, was of an exclusively East Asian grouping - a caucus without the Caucasians, as he called it. He now says it has been diluted by the inclusion of Australia and New Zealand.

Although there are built-in tensions and contradictions among its members that could hobble effective action, the new group does embody a broad and, some say, necessary vision for the future.

"We have little choice but to construct a new architecture for East Asia," said former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong of Singapore recently. "If East Asia does not coalesce, it will lose out to the Americas and Europe."

The world will be a different place in 30 or 40 years, with Asia at the forefront, said Daljit Singh, a visiting senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. The new grouping is a response to this change. "Its significance is that it symbolizes the Asian century, the coming of age, in a sense, because by 2050 Asia will have three of the four largest economies in the world," he said in a telephone interview.

These three - China, Japan and India - will be represented at the meeting, along with the 10 Southeast Asian nations, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Russia will be allowed to attend as an observer.

The exclusion of the fourth big economy, that of the United States, is also a signal of changing dynamics, Mr. Singh said, but the American presence remains strong through its close allies, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Already there are tensions among the members as China continues to seek a dominant role in the region, India presses for greater influence and the Southeast Asian nations struggle not to be overwhelmed by their new partners.

The leaders of China and South Korea are not planning to meet with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan because of continuing disputes over wartime atrocities.

There has also been debate over the inclusion of Australia, New Zealand and India, which had lobbied to join the group.

The members of the core grouping, Asean, are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar.

This 38-year-old association is a smaller scale model for the East Asia summit meeting, with its disparities in economic strength and political structure. Acknowledging these from the start, Asean has adopted a careful, low-key policy of consensus that has blunted its effectiveness. It has begun to abandon that policy with Myanmar, which has resisted gentle pressure to ease its repressive policies and open its political process.

The expanded 16-member grouping will account for about three billion people and one-fifth of global trade. Both these figures are expected to rise steeply in the years to come.

But with scale comes increased diversity, bringing together nations as rich as Japan and as poor as Cambodia; as democratically open as India and as closed as the Communist leadership in Laos. Its members will be as small as Brunei, with a population of less than 400,000, and as huge as China and India.

The expansion of the East Asia gathering to include non-Asians and close partners of the United States has defeated its purpose, said Mr. Mahathir, who stepped down as prime minister two years ago and is holding an alternative forum after the summit meeting.

"This so-called East Asia summit is an East Asia Australasian summit," he said last week. "Australia's views do not represent the East, but the views of America."

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Asian Leaders Search for Common Interests, in America's Absence

By SETH MYDANS
Published: December 15, 2005
By SETH MYDANS

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec. 14 - Japan and China were not talking. Russia was talking to everybody. Australia was fending off bad press. The Philippines was denying coup rumors. India was offering to teach English. And the United States, for once, was looking in from the cold.

On Wednesday, the inaugural East Asia Summit, which brought together 16 regional leaders for the first time, was a mix of here-we-go-again and never-seen-this-before as Asia began shuffling the political deck for the century ahead.

"The East Asia Summit was a great success," declared the host, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi of Malaysia, in a final news conference. "There was a high degree of acceptance that we are one community with a common interest."

That, in fact, was the lasting question at the end of the one-day meeting, which followed a summit meeting of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean.

What is the shape of the region as the "Asian century" begins; is it one community; can it agree on a common interest?

With complex crisscrossing national agendas, the major dynamic was the competition for regional dominance between the established powers - Japan and the United States - and the rising giant, China.

The United States declined to join the summit meeting because of a reluctance to sign a pledge renouncing the use of force and interference in internal affairs in the region.

With the United States absent, the competition between Japan and China was played out here in a spat over old war wounds.

Because Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan had once again visited a shrine to Japanese who died in World War II, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China refused to meet him, placing the new association's two most powerful members in mute confrontation.

South Korea was also at loggerheads with Japan over what it saw as Tokyo's failure to acknowledge and adequately address wartime atrocities.

The membership of the group had itself been the subject of dispute, with the eventual admission of Western-oriented Australia and New Zealand which, along with Japan, were seen as conduits for American influence.

America's absence from this major forum is shortsighted, said Jusuf Wanandi, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Indonesia.

"I know about the mess in the Middle East, but don't be distracted," he said by telephone. "This is definitely, whether you like it or not, the most important region for the future."

Asia needs the United States, too, he said, as a balancing force and as an economic partner.

The Southeast Asian group is made up of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.