Chinese leaders are committed to economic modernization, not only because it will make China strong but also because they need it to sustain popular support.

From a U.S. perspective, the summit agenda seems vague. Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi describes it as “the first milestone on the route to the East Asian Community.” But a supra-national Asian Union comparable to the European Union is not remotely in the cards. Asians’ huge stake in North American and European markets rules out a protectionist Fortress Asia. The first effort to establish such a grouping, spearheaded in the early 1990s by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, aroused fears of a closed and implicitly anti-American bloc. By contrast, Asian leaders are presenting the current drive as a fluid, benign effort to address common challenges based on an outward-oriented, cosmopolitan East Asian identity.

What is clear, though, is that the countries of this Asian-Pacific pact believe that since the 1990s, the United States has lost interest in their part of the world. In the meantime, these countries have formed their own preferential bilateral and regional trade agreements that engender closer relationships. These agreements have both commercial and symbolic value in Asia, and many Asians think the United States has not paid enough attention to the diplomatic message behind them. The United States still dominates the balance of power in the Asian Pacific region, but China (and increasingly India) is gaining ground in the influence game. The ASEAN +3 grouping puts America’s broader strategic interests at risk, however, not because of what China is doing, but because of what the United States is not doing.

Malign Neglect
In recent trips to Southeast Asia, I have met with numerous concerned Asians from business, government and academic circles who have asked me, “Why isn’t the United States paying attention to this region?”

Tommy Koh, a widely respected Singaporean diplomat and think tank leader, phrased regional concerns eloquently in a recent article in PacNet, the online newsletter of the East-West Center in Honolulu. “We do not wish to be treated either with benign neglect or merely as the second front of the global war against terrorism,” Koh writes. He suggests, as do many opinion leaders in the area, that the United States hold its own summit between heads of state in ASEAN—as China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand have all done. President Clinton convened the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Seattle in 1993, but U.S. interest in APEC began to wane in the second half of the Clinton administration.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Brunei  Darussalam Cambodia Indonesia Laos Malaysia Myanmar Philippines Singapore Thailand Vietnam

U.S. presidents generally do not like to travel halfway around the world to meetings that offer no tangible outcome, while the Asian leaders consider meetings along the line of the December summit important less for addressing clear-cut goals than for relationship building. Moreover, we have consistently refused to hold a summit with ASEAN itself because of our legitimate dismay over the treatment of the popular opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, which is a member of ASEAN but not APEC. Both political parties in the United States have taken the position that such a summit could legitimize Myanmar’s ruling military junta. Meanwhile, China and India are courting Myanmar’s regime because of the country’s energy resources and strategic location. Asian leaders, many of whom are dismayed by the ability of single-issue constituencies to capture and narrow U.S. policy, would better understand a strategy of at least limited engagement.

What should be of particular concern to the U.S. is that our recent perceived neglect has, as Koh says, put us “in danger of losing the contest for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.” This is a region that is home to 250 million Muslims, who practice their religion in a tolerant manner, within a multicultural society. “The U.S.,” Koh says, “should acknowledge Malaysia and Indonesia as role models for other Muslim countries.”

Our one-sided agenda in Asia focuses overwhelmingly on antiterrorism, nonproliferation and protection of our homeland. The invasion of Iraq and lopsided endorsement of heavy-handed Israeli policies have fed the notion that Americans are enemies of Islam. The ensuing upsurge of anti-Americanism contributes to terrorism and other protest movements that threaten to destabilize Asian governments.

President Bush’s administration has alienated Asians by delaying or denying visas to students and other visitors. The State Department has only barely begun to rebuild the once-popular U.S. information services and libraries abroad ravaged by Senator Jesse Helms’ budget cutting in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Visiting Southeast Asia in 2003, Chinese President Hu Jintao won praise for his cooperative spirit and willingness to listen. By contrast, Bush’s visit at the same time left Asians with a one-note, take-it-or-leave-it message centered on terrorism.

On top of a policy that comes across as tin-ear moralizing, our economic behavior troubles the Asians. Like their European counterparts, East Asia’s central bankers and finance ministers believe that the United States’ addiction to spending has created the risk of a global hard landing in which all will suffer. The United States’ record-high trade deficit ($617 billion in 2004) and yawning budget deficit are widely believed to be unsustainable. Meanwhile, the declining dollar has drained much of the value of Asia’s huge dollar reserves.

Crisis Management
One of the primary reasons that East Asian nations want to strengthen their regional ties is that they believe it will help them gain a stronger collective voice in international institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The suffering that swept the region following the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 left lingering disillusionment not only with the IMF but also with the United States. East Asians want to be in a stronger position to head off or cope with another crisis. They have already negotiated a series of swap agreements and are discussing ways to improve cross-border capital flows and correct weak points, such as the region’s overdependence on local bank loans and the absence of a regional bond market.

The Asian financial crisis provided an unexpected opportunity for China to emerge as an influential community builder. As the crisis intensified, China stepped forward with a series of highly visible near-term measures to promote trade, tourism and outward Chinese investment in Southeast Asia. The Chinese also got credit for not devaluing their currency. By contrast, when the Thai baht collapsed in July 1997, triggering the crisis, Washington stood by watching—and then helped Mexico.

Since then, China has shown an increasing sense of outward orientation and a willingness to embrace commercial diplomacy in the region, a term that encompasses not only trade and investment but also political and security relations. This new good-neighbor policy signals a reorientation of China’s strategic mindset. Chinese leaders are committed to economic modernization, not only because it will make China strong, but also because they need it to sustain popular support. Economic modernization requires an open, peaceful environment. In the 1990s, Chinese strategists realized that they could help shape that environment and that doing so required improving both regional and global relations.

Granted, Beijing remains rigid about Taiwan, which is excluded from the proposed community on China’s insistence. The tension in cross-strait relations is a regional threat that China insists is a domestic problem and not the business of its neighbors, let alone the West. This is one of many reasons that the countries of East Asia, the smaller countries in particular, see the United States as an essential counterweight to China.

Balancing Act
All of the ASEAN +3 countries, including China, openly support a substantial U.S. presence in the region for the foreseeable future. Many people in the region welcome China’s new role, but they have no desire to be dominated by China—or by Japan or India, for that matter. They see an actively engaged United States as a balancing and stabilizing presence that expands their room to maneuver and their freedom to choose. The risk is not that the United States will be expelled from Asia, but that our voice will be slowly drained of influence through our own lack of foresight.

America’s strategic economic interests in Asia include the free flow of energy, trade and investment; export controls; telecommunications and aerospace exports; and measures to dry up the financing of terrorism and crime. Many friendly Asian governments will continue to share these interests as well as long-standing U.S. goals such as human rights and democracy. But they will be under pressure to adjust their priorities, at least at the margins. The balance of influence will gradually shift further toward Beijing—while America’s highest leadership, preoccupied as usual with the Middle East, looks the other way.

This subtle realignment could gradually ripple through the world economy because Asia is the current locomotive of world growth. Investor confidence is linked to the U.S. presence in Asia. This presence has become overwhelmingly military, but for most of the post-World War II period, it was solidly backed by careful and competent diplomacy and by a range of instruments, including trade agreements, aid, technical assistance and educational exchanges. If the United States is perceived to be neglecting Asia, its role as a stabilizer and buffer will diminish, along with its leverage.

On the other hand, Southeast Asia saw our response to the relief effort following the December tsunami, while somewhat delayed, as an example of the U.S.—and the U.S. military presence—at its most generous. China gave some money, but it was the United States that behaved like a responsible world power and cobbled together a coalition of navies from the U.S., Australia, India and Japan to be first on the scene to provide significant aid.

We would be wise to make this kind of attentiveness the norm again, through intensive, ongoing, candid, high-level, strategic discussions that would be similar to but far broader than those sparked by North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Thus far, however, Washington seems uninterested.

Ellen Frost, a visiting fellow at the Institute for International Economics and an adjunct research fellow at the National Defense University’s Institute of National Strategic Studies, is a former government official.