The Hard Edge to Soft Power

It’s increasingly clear that Chinese are interested in developing their soft power, as well as their military and economic power. Is this something that Americans should be concerned about? Is the development of another country’s soft power entirely benign, or can it legitimately be of concern to others?

Some forms of soft power are non-threatening. These include the attractiveness of a country’s culture, the beauty of its landscape, the appeal of its educational system, even the skill of its diplomatic corps. To be sure, there may be a degree of competitiveness here, in the sense that all these forms of soft power may enable a country to develop more vital hubs of cultural, tourist, intellectual, and diplomatic activity than other countries enjoy. But the overall effect is positive: everyone benefits from the emergence of these new centers of soft power.

But two other types of soft power may be somewhat less benign. They are the use of soft power to explicitly legitimize the development of one’s own harder forms of power; and then the use of soft power to delegitimize another country’s power, whether hard or soft. Both of these, especially the second, may make the acquisition of soft power a much more competitive undertaking. And while China is clearly trying – with some degree of success – to develop the benign forms of soft power, it is also attempting to create these two other forms of soft power as well.


Legitimizing Chinese power

One key purpose of soft power is to legitimize the development and deployment of harder forms of power, both military and economic. Since hard power can appear threatening, soft power can be used to reassure others about the intentions that harder power will ultimately serve.

Chinese became interested in this issue when they grappled with what initially appeared to them to be a puzzle. After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, when the United States became the world’s sole superpower, why did not the rest of the world come together to counterbalance it? Chinese analysts considered two possible explanations for this. One was that the world was truly unipolar – that the US was so powerful that the only possible response was to bandwagon, not counterbalance. But the other, seemingly more plausible to Chinese analysts who see an irreversible trend toward multipolarity, was that the US was not seen as sufficiently threatening to warrant counterbalancing. And they concluded that the main reason why American predominance was not widely regarded as threatening was that America’s hard power was legitimized by its soft power.

This conclusion became even more relevant to Beijing when the rise of Chinese economic and military power toward the end of the 1990s began to produce concerns about China’s own intentions, and to give rise to the so-called “China Threat” theory. To counter that theory, Chinese analysts realized, Beijing would have to find ways of doing what the U.S. had done so well: to use soft power to legitimize its acquisition of hard power.

Beijing could have tried to do this by putting forward an idiosyncratic set of goals and values to justify the rise of Chinese power. For example, it could have reasserted some of the ideological values rooted in the Marxist-Leninist tradition. Or it could have presented a set of cultural values drawn from Chinese civilization. And, indeed, Beijing has used both these approaches, but to a remarkably limited degree. It continues to talk about a “new international economic order,” much as it did in the 1970s; and it has started to talk about creating a “harmonious world,” using a term that has much deeper resonance in Chinese traditional rhetoric than in contemporary international parlance.

But China’s main strategy has been to invoke universal international values – not specifically Marxist-Leninist or Chinese values -- to justify its rise. In so doing, China has been exercising soft power in an unusual way. It has not taken the approach described so well by Joseph Nye: persuading others to be like China. Instead, it has taken just the opposite tack: trying to persuade others that China wants to be just like them. In other words, China has been reassuring the rest of the world it has accepted international norms and values, and therefore its rise will not be a threat to the international community that upholds those values.

But of course, in invoking those international norms, China has done so selectively, stressing those with which it felt most comfortable and, as we will see in the next section, sometimes using them to subtly delegitimize the exercise of power by the United States. This list of selected universal norms and values is a long one, but they can be summarized by grouping them into five broader categories: goals, values, transactional norms, institutional norms, and policy norms.

• Goals: Chinese leaders speak of a variety of goals that they say China shares with other nations. Two frequently used formulations are “peace, prosperity, and partnership” for the international system as a whole, and “stability, development, and human rights” for the individual countries within it. These two formulations build on the earlier statement, associated with Deng Xiaoping, that the world is in an era of “peace and development” – a statement that, in turn, was a tacit repudiation of the Maoist formula of a world characterized by “war and revolution.”
  The Maoist formula was a good example of the presentation of an idiosyncratic set of goals that, in the end, appealed to only a relatively small number of people and to even fewer governments. By emphasizing the more universally held values of “peace and development,” in contrast, Deng's formula has been more reassuring form of soft power. The subsequent addition of values such as “prosperity,” “stability,” and “human rights” only enhances its appeal.
• Values: Here, China has also invoked universal values, but more selectively. It has championed the Westphalian values of national sovereignty and territorial integrity, together with the more recent value of cultural diversity. These lead China to oppose intervention by stronger powers in the internal affairs of the weak, oppose unwanted regulation of sovereign states by international institutions, and defend each government’s right to define its own path of development free of foreign pressure. To be sure, Beijing China no longer absolutizes these values, and is even willing to support economic sanctions and humanitarian intervention in certain circumstances. But in general China holds to what I call the “conservative” (or “modern”) values in international affairs, whereas the U.S. upholds what might be called more “liberal” (or “post-modern”) values – values that permit intervention and sanctions in the name of the protection human security and the promotion of human rights.
• Transactional norms: By transactional norms, I mean the norms that govern the interactions among states. Here, China has made a somewhat more original contribution – indeed, a contribution that some say will form the basis of a new Chinese theory of international relations – by saying that it stands for “partnerships” that are characterized by norms such as mutual understanding, trust, consensus, and cooperation. These are universal values, to be sure, but they have previously been applied more to domestic social relations than to the international relations among states. China also continues to uphold the related elements of the “five principles of peaceful coexistence,” including equality and mutual benefit.
• Institutional norms: Similarly, in its discussion of international organizations, Beijing favors those that follow the norm of universal (rather than selective) membership and that operate on the basis of consensus (rather than majority rule or minority dominance). In so doing, it claims two be upholding the principle of democratic governance of international affairs, and opposing any country’s claims to hegemony or dominance.
• Policy norms: China also has codified a set of norms that underlie specific foreign policies and development programs: For example, China says its foreign policy is organized around “defensive defense,” ”cooperative security,” “win-win” economic relationships, and unconditional foreign aid. And Beijing’s development policy advocates experimentalism, gradualism, and varied solutions to fit the particular circumstances of each developing country, all undertaken by a strong, authoritarian, pro-development state.

Delegitimizing American power

At the same time that Beijing is trying to use soft power to legitimize its growing role in the world, there are also some signs that it is simultaneously attempting, at least to a degree, to delegitimize American power and policy. It is doing so by suggesting the ways in which its selection of universal goals, values, and norms stand in contrast to America’s, and the ways in which American foreign and development policies violate the norms and values that China espouses.

Let’s proceed through the same five categories outlined above, to see how Beijing uses them to criticize the United States, and thereby attempts to delegitimize the American role in the world:

• Goals: Here, the differences between China and the U.S. are centered more on the goals that Beijing asserts for individual countries than on its goals for the international system. On the latter, China does not imply that the U.S. does not join China in favoring international peace and prosperity as ultimate objectives. But on the former, China asserts far more differences with the U.S. By setting out China’s three goals – stability, development, and human rights -- Chinese analysts say that the U.S. is focused only on one (human rights), and even there is focused primarily on political and civil rights, rather than on the economic and social rights that have equal standing under international law. Beijing does not accept the charge that China is not as committed to human rights as is the U.S. Instead, it says that the U.S. ignores the developing world’s equal interest in stability and development, especially for poorer states, and is willing to sacrifice them in a quixotic attempt to promote democracy and pluralism in countries that are not yet “ready” to achieve them.
• Values: Here, the differences are far starker, although not absolute. As noted above, China can be seen as upholding “conservative” values in international affairs, which Beijing then contrasts with the “liberal” values (and I stress this is my term, not Beijing’s) promoted by the United States: the right of the U.S., either unilaterally, in concert with its allies, or with the backing of international organizations, to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs to impose Western policies, institutions, and values. Increasingly, too, Beijing accuses the U.S. of a cultural bias – of a “West-centric discourse” that denies the acceptability of anything other than Western policies, institutions, or values in evaluating the domestic and foreign policies of other countries.
• Transactional norms: As noted above, China advocates transactional norms that embody the ideal of cooperative relationships among trusting partners. Beijing accuses the United States of frequently violating those norms. It claims that America’s relationship with China, like its relationships with other countries it regards as potential threats, is characterized by mistrust and misunderstanding. China also says that the U.S. deals with other countries through sanctions and pressure, rather than in a cooperative and consensual sprit; and conducts its relations with other countries in a hierarchical or hegemonic way, rather than forming equal partnerships of the sort that Beijing claims to favor.
• Institutional norms: China reserves some of its most pointed criticism of the United States for violating its favored institutional norms: universal membership organizations that operate on the basis of consensus. It has criticized US alliances, especially in Asia, and US proposals for the creation of a league of democracies, as “dividing the world” on the basis of “ideological thinking” and a “cold war mentality.” In other words, these are allegedly institutional reflections of a American mindset that demands allegiance to “Western values,” mistrusts and misunderstands countries that do not unequivocally accept those values, and creates hierarchical and exclusive relationships centered on the US rather than more equal and inclusive “partnerships.”
• Policy norms: Finally, many of China’s policy norms can be seen as criticisms, direct or indirect, of American policies. For example, “defensive defense” is a criticism of the US policies of preemptive and preventive war. Similarly, China contrasts its “no-strings-attached” approach to ODA with the conditionality associated with the United States and the Washington-based international financial institutions, and contrasts the gradualistic and experimental strategy of development with the orthodox neo-liberal approach it attributes to the “Washington Consensus.”
  

Conclusion

My point here is not to suggest that China’s normative arguments are correct or unanswerable. Rather, it is to assert that China is using normative arguments to legitimate its rising military and economic power, so as to reduce the chances that China’s rise will be seen as a threat that requires other countries to counterbalance it. It is also to suggest that China is using those same normative arguments to delegitimize some aspects of American foreign and defense policy.

The main implication is that the U.S. will have develop effective counterarguments (or, in some cases, to modify its policies) if it is to maintain the international legitimacy that is such an important part of its overall national power. Many American analysts focus on the rise of the harder forms of Chinese power, or the more benign forms of soft power. They may not be paying adequate attention to the ways in which that soft power can possess a harder edge.

How to Promote Human Rights in China?

The Center for American Progress, one of the Washington think tanks I respect the most, has issued a new report on the promotion of human rights in China, entitled Strategic Persistence: How the United States Can Help Improve Human Rights in China. The report was written by William Schulz, a senior fellow at CAP who was formerly executive director of Amnesty International.

The report contains an overall assessment of the human rights situation in China, and offers some detailed recommendations about how the U.S. government, business, and non-governmental organizations can promote human rights there. But to me, the most important and persuasive part of the report is the overall strategy that Schulz believes should underpin American policy on the subject.

Schulz begins by underscoring two key assumptions:

• First, our leverage to force China to advance human rights and democracy is limited. Our “sticks” are relatively weak and counterproductive. This was already demonstrated after the Tiananmen Crisis of 1989, when we tried but failed to use trade policy to force improvements in China’s human rights record, but then backed down when in essence Beijing called our bluff. The lack of leverage, and the cost of trying to exercise it, would be even greater today.
• And second, the growth in the various elements of China’s national power, and the emergence of a wide range of transnational issues in a globalized world, means that the agenda between the two countries is far longer than ever before. No longer can we focus entirely on the traditional trinity of trade, Taiwan, and human rights. We now must address a far greater range of bilateral, regional, and international issues now than we did twenty years ago, and we need China’s cooperation if we are to manage those issues successfully.

Still, as Schulz points out, the promotion of human rights remains an important American objective, for both moral reasons and practical ones. We want Chinese, like all people, to enjoy rights that we regard as inherent and inalienable, and that are now enshrined in several international legal conventions that China has signed and ratified. Violations of human rights undermine the Chinese business climate: they are a potential source of political instability, can reduce the government’s responsiveness to economic and social problems, and can produce reputational risks for firms operating there. As Schulz points out, China’s domestic policy on human rights is correlated with Beijing’s reluctance to criticize human rights violations by repressive regimes in the Third World, let alone to accept the principle of humanitarian intervention.

Of course, democratization will not solve all America’s international problems. I don’t agree with the former Clinton administration’s position that democracies inevitably make better trading partners and agree with the United States on key international issues. That’s an exaggeration, as our trade disputes with Japan and the disagreements with our European allies over Iraq have so amply demonstrated. But while all good things do not necessarily go together in the real world, promoting human rights will remain, and should remain, an American foreign policy objective.

How then to promote human rights in the new context, in which America needs Beijing’s cooperation on a variety of international issues and America has limited leverage over the human rights situation in China? Here again I agree with the principal conclusions of the CAP report. Putting them in my own words, and occasionally adding my own gloss, I would summarize them as follows:

• We should focus on supporting positive developments, working with both Chinese government agencies and with civil society where it is possible to move forward. But I don’t see this as a choice of “carrots” over “sticks,” as the CAP report does. Describing this policy as offering China “carrots” might imply paying the Chinese government to do something they would not otherwise do. Rather, we would be providing funds and technical assistance to enable the Chinese government and China’s emerging civil society to conduct reforms that they already want to undertake, and encourage them to take those reforms one step further.
• We should continue to make candid assessments of China’s human rights situation, through such mechanisms as the annual State Department human rights report. But in so doing we need a broad definition of that subject. Civil and political rights, as Schulz points out, are not conterminous with democracy. Indeed, the attainment of these two objectives will almost certainly occur on quite different time scales, the first sooner than the second. Furthermore, internationally protected human rights include economic and social rights as well as civil and political rights. Poverty alleviation is as worthy an objective – and as admirable an achievement -- as democracy promotion. Relatedly, those assessments should also be well-informed and well-balanced, acknowledging positive developments as well criticizing as negative ones. One-sided critiques of China’s human rights violations will have little credibility, either in China or in third countries.
• Our approach to promoting human rights in China should be as multilateral as possible. This means working with our allies to present a common front on the issue, and pressing the UN Human Rights Council to look objectively at China’s human rights record. Working through multilateral channels will be frustrating at some times, as in the recent Universal Periodic Review of China conducted by the UN Human Rights Council, where China rejected a large number of the recommendations submitted by democratic states. Multilateral mechanisms are unlikely to be any more effective at forcing change in China than are measures taken unilaterally by the United States. But sometimes they will have an impact, as when dockworkers in several African countries refused to offload Chinese weapons destined for Zimbabwe. And working multilaterally demonstrates that concern with human rights is not simply a unique American preoccupation, and that America’s assessments of China’s human rights record reflect not just American preferences, but widely shared norms.
• Businesses should also promote human rights, in part by raising questions about the operational and reputational risks associated with working business in countries that violate them, and above all by doing no harm when conducting business there – with regard both to how they treat their own workers, and to whether they sell the Chinese government equipment (such as police surveillance equipment) that can be used to violate human rights of Chinese citizens.
• Perhaps most important, as the emphasis changes from threats of sanction to offers of assistance, the focus will also shift from the role of government to the role of NGOs. NGOs can better perform both the critical and cooperative functions outlined above. Compared with governments, they are under fewer obligations to weigh other factors in their approach to China. While they should also be objective and well-balanced, as advocacy organizations they can also be blunt and outspoken. And, also compared with governments, NGOs that operate in China are in a better position to promote positive developments inside that country, albeit perhaps with financial assistance from governments and international organizations.

CAP’s call for “strategic persistence” on human rights is a modest prescription that carries no guarantee of short-term success. But it is a realistic one, based on the acknowledgement that the more can be achieved by encouraging positive developments and by offering candid but objective criticisms of negative ones than by threatening sanctions that will be costly, ineffective, and possibly counterproductive.

Will Australia Have to Choose Between the US and China?

I mentioned in an earlier blog the Australian concern that the balance of power in Asia might be shifting away from Australia’s ally, the United States, and toward China, a country that many Australians still mistrust. I noted that this was one of the two issues that I was most frequently asked about during my visit to Australia at the end of last year. The second, which I have not yet had time to write about, was closely related to it: will Australia ever be forced to choose between China and the United States?

Here, the question is just as interesting as the answer, because it says much about Australian history, and the ways in which the present situation Australia faces are both familiar and unprecedented.

The familiar aspect of Australia’s present international situation is the Australian perception that is a relatively small country, whose larger neighbors cannot entirely be trusted, and which therefore needs a stronger ally, necessarily at a distance. Until World War II, that ally was Britain; since World War II, that ally has been the United States.

These alliances have been in some ways comfortable to Australia. Britain was the previous colonial power, and then British monarch remained Australia’s head of state after Australia achieved independence. The United States shares many common values with Australia, and common historical links to Great Britain.

However, no matter whether it was Britain or America that served as Australia’s ally, Australia has always appeared to fear abandonment – that is, that the stronger ally would desert it in a time of need. Perhaps this has been a result of the geographical distances between Australia and its ally, or because of Australia’s peripheral strategic location, which might make the ally less inclined to defend it.

One way that Australia tried to cope with this risk was to demonstrate its fidelity to its ally, repeatedly and at considerable cost.

One only has to visit the Australian War Memorial in Canberra – one of the world’s most remarkable military museums – to have that point brought home. From the Sudan in the 1850s and the Boer War at the end of the 19th century, through two world wars, through Korea and Vietnam, and now down to Iraq and Afghanistan, Australians fought, with great heroism and sacrifice, alongside their stronger allies, even though Australia itself had not been attacked. (To be sure, Australia was attacked by the Japanese during World War II, but only several years after it had already declared war on Germany in 1939.)

To some degree, when the stronger ally was Great Britain, the ties to a common monarchy appeared to require this. In Australia’s declaration of war in 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, the prime minister of the time, Robert Menzies, explained his decision extraordinarily concisely: “Great Britain has declared war on [Germany], and as a result Australia is also at war.” But legalities aside, the main motivation was to show faithfulness to Australia’s principal security guarantor, in the expectation that such fealty would be rewarded in the event of a threat to Australia.

When applied to the present situation, Australia’s concern is therefore that, if the United States got into a conflict with China over Taiwan, American would expect Australia to come to its aid, and that Australia would feel obliged to do so. Faced with a conflict between the two great powers of the region, Australia would be faced with an awkward choice: remain loyal to its ally, or avoid any commitments to that ally in order to avoid hostilities with a very powerful neighbor.

And that leads to the second historical comparison: the one that is unprecedented for Australia. In the past, Australia’s two major allies – the United Kingdom and the United States – were simultaneously Australia’s biggest trading partners. That is no longer true. China is now Australia’s largest trading partner, because of its large and growing imports of raw materials from Australia. To choose between China and the United States is not just a choice between war and peace, or between accommodating a potential enemy and remaining loyal to an ally, but also a choice between one’s most important strategic partner and one’s most important commercial partner.

Of course Americans can reassure Australians that China and the United States share a powerful common interest in avoiding conflict or confrontation, certainly on a scale that would involve allies like Australia. Thus, the apparent necessity to choose is most likely a false dilemma.

Still, this question does raise yet again a difference between the ways in which Americans and Asians think about the region. To Americans, the biggest question concerns the strategic implications of the rise of China. To most Asians, the most important question is the likely American response to that development.

To Americans, in other words, the issue of greatest concern is the future of China; to Asians, in contrast, the issue of greatest concern is the future of the U.S.-China relationship. And given Australia's long-standing tradition of loyalty to its allies, that issue is of particularly great interest.

China's Perception of Obama

This blog is drawn, with slight modifications, from a posting that appeared on the Asia Foundation's blogsite, In Asia (http://asiafoundation.org/in-asia)

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I was recently asked to describe how the Chinese have assessed the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. Their assessment has evolved somewhat over time, and can be divided into three stages: the campaign, the transition, and the (still very young) post-inaugural period. For each, we can consider both official and unofficial Chinese opinion. The latter, some of which appears in the Chinese press and on Chinese blogs, provides useful supplement – and sometimes, an interesting contrast – with more official statements and commentary.

The Campaign

During the campaign, the Chinese officially said little that would hint towards a preference among the three major candidates: John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. The Chinese generally like continuity of leadership in the U.S. They prefer leaders they know, who have already been converted from an initial skepticism about China to a commitment to a reasonably close working relationship. This was the case with President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. This election year, however, there was no incumbent and all the leading candidates ran on platforms promising significant change.

But, of all the candidates, they knew Hillary Clinton best. Yet Clinton worried them as well, since the Chinese were not confident that she had overcome her critical views of China’s human rights records, especially with regard to women and Tibetans, to the same degree her husband appeared to have done. And some of her statements on trade issues during the latter stages of the campaign, especially as she fought to save her candidacy in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, appeared to reflect a high level of protectionist sentiment.

The Chinese also generally prefer Republicans to Democrats, largely because the presidents they have worked with most closely – George W. Bush, his father before him, and especially Richard Nixon – have been Republicans. They also fear that, compared with Republicans, Democrats are more likely to criticize China’s human rights record, and represent protectionist sentiments within American society. But the Chinese were considerably concerned about candidate John McCain. McCain did not focus on human rights or trade issues, but he had called for the creation of a “League of Democracies” that might not only exclude China, but also serve as an alternative to the United Nations for legitimating American foreign policy initiatives, which might include sanctions and humanitarian intervention. McCain also favored the deployment of an American ballistic missile defense system, and explicitly stated that one of its targets would be China’s strategic capability.

In spite of those concerns, although the Chinese never expressed a clear preference, based on their traditional criteria, Barack Obama would probably have been their last choice: a Democratic candidate who had never visited China, with whom Chinese had few personal ties, and who promised the greatest degree of change in both American domestic and foreign policy.

Chinese outside of government had their own views of Obama, which seem to have gone through an intriguing evolution as the campaign proceeded. Like much of the rest of the world – and like many Americans — Chinese were intrigued about the possibility that an African-American might actually be elected president of the United States. At first, some actually appeared to think that this was sign of American weakness – even of the decay of the American political system. But as they learned more about Obama and his background – the fact that he had been educated at Columbia and Harvard, that he was highly intelligent and extremely articulate, and that his policy positions placed him in the middle of the political spectrum rather on the extreme – reservations turned to admiration. Many ordinary Chinese, especially those sympathetic to the United States, reacted to Obama’s election with admiration, and even joy. Many thought that it reflected the openness of American society and the responsibility of the U.S. political system. As one friend wrote me just after the election, they felt it showed what “a great country” the United States is.

The Transition

Faced with the fact that America had elected the candidate they knew least, and about whom they had some of the greatest reservations, the Chinese then had to prepare themselves for the inauguration. Not only did Chinese officials and the official Chinese media express their desire to continue a cooperative relationship with the United States, but they also presented several reasons why they were confident such a development would occur.

Restating a key theme in Chinese analysis of U.S.-China relations since 1980, well-connected Chinese scholars said that the desire for cooperative engagement with China has consistently been mainstream American policy. Even those presidents who had campaigned against that policy or for other fundamental changes in American relations with Beijing – presidents such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush — had eventually changed their minds after a relatively short time in office. Even if Barack Obama were to adopt a tougher American line toward Beijing, that would be unlikely to endure.

This time, this was especially true because of the growing economic interdependence between the two countries. Especially during the present global financial crisis, that interdependence, and the importance of the two economies, would make cooperation essential. The growing list of transnational issues in which the two countries had a stake – terrorism, proliferation, energy security, and climate change – also appeared to Chinese analysts to be a powerful factor promoting a cooperative and stable relationship.

In this election especially, China had not been a major campaign issue. That in itself was reassuring to the Chinese, since it reduced the chances that the newly elected president would adopt a more hostile or critical approach to Beijing, even temporarily. And of the three major candidates, Obama had appeared marginally less protectionist than Clinton, and certainly did not support McCain’s positions on ballistic missile defense and a league of democracies

Finally, although Chinese had often expressed a greater degree of comfort with Republican presidents, some officials began to acknowledge the contributions of Democratic presidents to the U.S.-China relationship. It was Jimmy Carter who had actually completed the task of normalizing the relationship; and it was Bill Clinton, despite his original threat to remove China’s Most-Favored-Nation trading status, who had negotiated China’s membership in the World Trade Organization and who had secured permanent normal trade relations for Beijing.

Post-inauguration

It has been just a couple of weeks since the inauguration of Barack Obama, but some Chinese are now expressing some signs of concern about the new president’s intentions toward their country.
Obama’s inaugural speech did not contain any explicit reference to China, and thus did not include a commitment to continue a cooperative relationship between Washington and Beijing, as some Chinese may have hoped. Instead, it referred to the successful American struggle against fascism and communism under earlier administrations, and then talked critically about those governments that “suppress dissent” and are on the “wrong side of history.”

It is not at all clear to me that these passages were intended to refer to China. And yet, it is true that the phrase “the wrong side of history” had been used by Bill Clinton, in a meeting with Jiang Zemin, to refer to China’s policy toward Tibet. If Barack Obama and his speechwriters did not remember that reference, Chinese analysts most certainly did.

Of even greater concern were the written responses to questions about the currency question made by Timothy Geithner during his Senate confirmation hearings after his appointment as Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner’s answer included the sentence that “President Obama – backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists – believes that China is manipulating its currency,” implying to some that the Treasury Department would cite China as a currency manipulator in its next semi-annual review of the question. Also, they feared that the new administration would support some kind of legislation that would impose sanctions against China and presumably other countries who had been found to be manipulating their currency.

In fact, Geithner’s full answers qualified that particular sentence in important ways. He said that, in the short run, the most important economic challenge facing the two countries was not addressing the value of the renminbi, but rather coordinating stimulus packages that could promote the recovery of the global economy. And, over the longer term, the issue again was not necessarily currency value, but rather the underlying need to encourage China’s shift away toward consumption-led growth (and, by implication, away from export- or investment-led growth). When and if the U.S. did raise the currency issue, Geithner carefully quoted Obama’s campaign statements that he would “use aggressively all the diplomatic avenues open to him to seek change in China’s currency practices,” wording that did not necessarily imply the use of countervailing duties or other sanctions, and even raised the question of “how and when to broach the subject in order to do more good than harm.” But it was the opening sentence, not the subsequent qualifications, that attracted most attention both in the U.S. and in China.

At a minimum, therefore, these two statements – Obama’s inaugural address and Geithner’s confirmation testimony – were somewhat ambiguous about the new administration’s approach to China. The explicit official responses – as during the transition period – have been largely optimistic. Both Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Chinese Ambassador to the U.S., Zhou Enzhong, continue to express their hope for a stable and cooperative U.S.-China relationship. But there have also been indications of concern, particularly from unofficial observeers.

Obama's inaugural speech contained elements that were worrisome both to both Chinese officials and to Chinese analysts in universities and think tanks. Deleted from Chinese broadcasts of Obama’s inaugural speech and from the transcripts in the official Chinese media were the passages about America contributing to the end of communism, and to authoritarian regimes standing on the “wrong side of history.” Interestingly, too, some Chinese analysts have referred to yet other aspects of the inaugural address that they regard as negative. China Daily carried an article that criticized Obama’s reassertion of American global leadership in his inaugural address, commenting caustically that “U.S. leaders have never been shy of talking about their country’s ambition to be the leader of the world. For them, it is a divinely granted destiny no matter what other nations think.”

Geithner's testimony at his confirmation hearings aroused even greater concern. One prominent Chinese specialist on U.S.-China relations was quoted as saying that Geithner’s comments on currency manipulation reflected a lack of “maturity,” while a Chinese central bank official warned that a finding that confirmed China manipulated the value of the renminbi would obstruct cooperation on what Geithner had acknowledged to be the more immediate issue: cooperation on managing the global financial crisis.

But Chinese observers have reserved most of their venom for the charges in American commentary – now heard with increasing frequency – that the high Chinese savings rate, the high Chinese foreign exchange reserves, or both, provided the liquidity that produced the asset bubble that lay at the bottom of the global financial crisis. Xinhua’s reaction was typical: “The high savings rate in emerging markets is not a reason for developed countries to loosen financial regulation and look on, arms folded, as financial institutions develop new derivatives and let financial bubbles balloon. The reasons for the current financial crisis lie in excessive consumption, high indebtedness, and lack of financial regulation.” These comments were echoed more recently, although a bit more indirectly, by Premier Wen Jiabao in remarks made at the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos. Chinese appear concerned that this analysis lies behind the Obama Administration's apparent determination to place more pressure on China to revalue the renminbi.

Conclusion

In short, Chinese observers are viewing the incoming Obama Administration with some apprehension. Officials have been more reserved in their expressions of concern than have analysts, but in general the Chinese reaction has contained three themes: (1) worry that the Obama Administration will take a harder line on trade and human rights; (2) disappointment that it has not expressed a clearer desire for a cooperative relationship with China and has not assigned higher priority to its relations with Beijing; but (3) confidence that ultimately the Obama Administration will realize that America's relationship with China is so important that cooperation with Beijing will be necessary.

America's evolving role in a changing Asia

Earlier this month, I visited three capitals in Southeast Asia – Bangkok, Phnom Penh, and Hanoi – to present the latest in a series of reports on America’s role in Asia, produced each presidential election year by the Asia Foundation.

The report was not easy to summarize. It contains chapters on no fewer than eight countries and sub-regions (Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), plus seven additional chapters on key functional issues (trade, security, alliances, the environment, energy, terrorism, and regional architecture). All the chapters incorporate individual insights on trends in the region, as well as numerous detailed recommendations on policy. The report also reflects a few differences of opinion, both among the Asian participants and between the American and Asian contributors, especially with regard to questions involving regional architecture.

But the main purposes of the project – to identify the key trends in the region, and to make policy recommendations to the incoming U.S. administration – provided a structure for my summary. Within that broad framework, I found that there was a remarkable degree of consensus on six major trends, and on ten broad policy recommendations. That consensus is presented below, although I have also indicated a few places where the contributors had different views, and where I have somewhat contrasting opinions of my own.


Key trends

1. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the bipolar international order that had formed at the end of World War II, there was a commonly held assumption that the world had become unipolar, with the U.S. in the dominant position. More than a decade later, however, it has become increasingly clear that the rise of new global and regional powers has created a multipolar world, not a unipolar one. But within that multipolar world, the longer-term balance among the global and regional powers remains uncertain. It will depend on domestic developments in the key national actors, particularly the relative speed and degree to which they recover from the global financial crisis. While the U.S. may remain the most powerful nation in the world in that future order, it is unlikely to dominate either the Asian balance or the global balance of power.

2. Because it involves the lowering of barriers to transborder flows of people, capital, and goods, globalization is promoting both economic interdependence and the emergence of a wide range of transborder issues. This is changing the international agenda, both in Asia and more globally, adding a wide range of new issues, as well as new economic opportunities. (I believe that globalization is transforming Asia and the world in yet another way: it is making the world multinodal, rather than multipolar. Rather than seeing the major world powers as relatively independent poles competing for position in a geopolitical balance of power, they should now be viewed as multiple nodes in an interdependent economic and financial network. In this new multimodal world, major nations continue to compete, but now as economic centers as well as military powers. They also have major common interests in maintaining the vitality of the global order and in managing transnational issues. The blend of competition and cooperation among the major powers is therefore very different in a multimodal world than it was in a multipolar one.)

3. Asia will remain a highly important region for both the U.S. and the world. It is home to several of the most important rising powers (China, India and, if it can develop a common foreign policy, ASEAN), as well as such established powers as the U.S., Japan, and Russia. It is almost certain to remain one of the world’s most economically dynamic regions. It is the location of the two most important unresolved issues left over from the Cold War: Korea and Taiwan. It is also a region in which every virtually contemporary transnational issue – from terrorism and climate change to transborder crime and communicable disease -- can be found and where effective solutions will need to be developed.

4. There is a widespread perception that America has become somewhat disengaged from this important region, to the extent that some Asians assert that Washington has been treating Asia with “benign neglect.” (I think this may be a bit exaggerated. I prefer to say that the U.S. is paying selective attention to the region, focusing only on the major powers [Japan, China, and India], “hot spots” [North Korea and Taiwan], and issues [the war on terror and non-proliferation] that are of greatest concern to the U.S.)

5. Asia is trying to build regional organizations that will eventually form an economic and security community for the region. The aim is to promote cooperative security, manage economic interdependence, and address the transnational issues that affect the region. But there are different assessments of the accomplishments and effectiveness of the organizations that have been created so far, especially such flagship institutions as ASEAN, ARF, and APEC. Asians (who stress process) are more positive about these organizations than are Americans (who emphasize concrete outcomes). Where Asians see these organizations as moving at “a pace comfortable to all,” Americans complain that they are like a naval convoy that is limited to “the speed of the slowest ship.” Equally important, there are also differences of opinion as to whether these organizations should be pan-Asian (excluding the U.S.) or pan-Pacific (including it).

6. There is a growing sense that global institutions (the UN Security Council, G-8, IMF, IBRD, etc.) do not adequately represent the emerging powers, including those in Asia (particularly China and India and, in the case of the Security Council, Japan).


Policy recommendations for the new administration

1. The U.S. should pay more comprehensive attention to Asia. This means, in particular, more attention to Southeast Asia and to the smaller states of South Asia, which feel particularly neglected. It also means greater attention to the issues of greatest concern to members of the region -- not just to the war on terror, non-proliferation, and sub-regional hot spots, but also to prosperity, financial stability, development, food security, energy security, climate change, public health, and disaster management. (I would add that this may also require increasing the “bandwidth” of the American foreign policy bureaucracy responsible for Asia, so that it can deal effectively with these additional issues.)

2. Preserving U.S. strategic dominance in the region – in other words, trying to make Asia into a unipolar region -- will not be a viable strategy. It is neither desired by most of the region, nor feasible given the rise of regional powers. Instead, the U.S. should look at itself more as an offshore balancer in the near term, and as an architect of effective regional cooperative security organizations over the longer term.

3. Even this somewhat more modest goal will require the U.S. to remain strategically engaged in the region. This means not only maintaining America’s forward military deployments, but also consolidating the U.S. alliances and building stable and cooperative security relationships with the emerging Asian powers.

4. The U.S. should maintain its commitment to free trade. The report recommends renewing the president’s trade promotion authority (“fast track”), resisting protectionism, pushing for the successful completion of the Doha Round, and completing and ratifying the free trade agreements that it is negotiating with the region. (While protectionism is indeed a danger during the current financial crisis, I believe that the oft-stated concerns about American protectionism are usually exaggerated. I would also note that the U.S. is not the only obstacle, and is not even the principal obstacle, to the completion of the Doha Round. Agricultural policy in Europe, and industrial policy in much of the Third World, are equally significant problems. I would also caution that, as the U.S. negotiates free trade agreements with countries in the region, many of its Asian counterparts will resist the demanding and comprehensive form of free trade agreement on which Washington insists. In this regard, the problem will not be American protectionism, but Asian protectionism.)

5. The U.S. should become more supportive of the construction of regional economic and security architecture. However, there was no clear conclusion among the American contributors to the report about which of the growing number of regional organizations hold the greatest promise. In addition, while there was a general consensus that the U.S. should sign the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation with ASEAN, there was a difference of opinion among the Asian participants as to whether the U.S. should be invited to join the East Asian Summit (also known as ASEAN+6).

6. The U.S. should also support an expanded role for the emerging Asian powers in global institutions. But the contributors differed somewhat as to whether the U.S. should insist that countries like India and China act as “responsible stakeholders,” accepting existing international norms without significant modification, or whether it should expect that those norms would be readjusted to reflect the interests and values of the rising powers.

7. In promoting development in Asia, the U.S. should not just support free trade, better governance, and respect for human rights, but should also provide more traditional forms of economic development assistance. In particular, the report recommends that the U.S. develop a program of investment in Asian physical infrastructure, to supplement initiatives being undertaken by China and Japan.

8. The U.S. should continue to pay attention to human rights and democracy, but should take a more positive approach. It should use more moderate rhetoric against human rights shortcomings, support reforms initiated by local governments and civil societies whenever possible, and be more consistent in its own behavior at home and abroad. Above all, the U.S. should not replace a single-minded focus on terrorism with an equally single-minded focus on human rights.

9. The U.S. should place more emphasis on the development and deployment of its soft power. But this implies more than devising a more effective foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. It also will require the U.S. to rebuild the instruments of public diplomacy (such as cultural and academic exchange) that have been neglected over the last several years.

10. The U.S. should increase its own economic competitiveness. This will be key not only to maximizing trade and investment flows with the region, but also to maintaining a commitment to free trade and to restoring the appeal of the American economic model.

These ten points can, in turn, be boiled down into three even broader recommendations:

1. In most of the areas on which the Bush Administration has focused, American policy in Asia has generally been appropriate. In these areas, the Obama Administration should stay the course, with perhaps some tactical adjustments to promote our evolving relationships with such countries as China, Japan, North Korea, and India. The exception to this generalization lies primarily in Southwest Asia, where the report recommends more dramatic changes in U.S. policies toward Pakistan and Afghanistan.

2. As noted above, however, the Bush Administration’s focus has been limited. The new administration should fill in the gaps that have been left by American selective attention to Asia.

3. The U.S. should work to sustain or rebuild all forms of American power in the region: hard, economic, and soft.


Asian reactions

The report was generally well received in the three capitals I visited, particularly in its suggestion that the U.S. pay more attention to neglected countries and issues. But there was some concern expressed about three aspects of the report: whether the new administration would actually support Asian multilateralism, whether it would accept a somewhat reduced role in the region, and whether it would place undue emphasis on human rights.

With regard to that first issue, some in the region will place considerable weight on whether or not President Obama chooses to attend the summit meeting between ASEAN summit and its dialogue partners that will be held in Thailand later in the year. The Thais are strongly urging that he do so, not only as an expression of a US interest in ASEAN, but also as an implicit endorsement of Thailand’s desire for a greater leadership role in the region, and an acknowledgement of Thailand’s return to political normalcy. And yet, some in Thailand explicitly said that it was “not the time” for the U.S. to join the East Asian Summit, underscoring the fact that the creation or maintenance of pan-Asian (as opposed to pan-Pacific) regional organizations was a real possibility. This underscored the tensions created by the American need to deal both with ASEAN and with regional organizations led by ASEAN – one of the contradictions I had identified in my earlier blog entitled “The Challenge of Engaging Southeast Asia.”

I sensed, moreover, that not everyone in the region was keen to see an unqualified American return to multilateralism. Cambodians seemed to welcome it, since they doubted that their country would otherwise attract sustained high-level attention from the U.S. But some Thais, and particularly some Vietnamese, appeared concerned that an American focus on multilateral approaches toward the region as a whole would mean less U.S. attention to bilateral relations with their own countries. Larger regional powers, with robust ties with the U.S., may fear that they might lose relative influence if Washington chose to deal with the region primarily through ASEAN or through other multilateral mechanisms. This illustrated yet another tension mentioned in my earlier blog: the contradiction between dealing with Southeast Asian nations individually, and dealing with them as members of ASEAN.

As for America’s role in the region, some in Thailand asked whether American would actually accept the fact that the U.S. could no longer dominate the region. Conversely, some in Vietnam raised the opposite concern, cautioning that the U.S. should not redefine its role too modestly, as they believed the term “offshore balancer” implied. In particular, they were worried that the U.S. was not paying attention to the conflicting claims in the South China Sea, and that this lack of concern might lead China at some point to assert its claims unilaterally and by force, producing a fait accompli to which the U.S. might be unwilling or unable to respond.

The report did not contain a chapter on human rights. Interestingly, not a single participant in any of the three meetings in Southeast Asia questioned this omission. Instead, there was some concern expressed that the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State might presage a return to what some regarded as the excessive focus on human rights of the Clinton Administration.

Is there a role for ethical principles in Chinese foreign policy?

The following post, on Chinese attitudes toward the role of ethical principles in shaping its foreign policy, appeared recently in the Carnegie Council's on-line journal, Policy Innovations (www.policyinnovations.org):

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In the fall of last year, the Carnegie Council sent a small delegation to Beijing to identify and discuss the ethical principles that guide China's international conduct. In addition to myself, the delegation included Jonathan Gage, a trustee of the Council and publisher of strategy+business, Booz and Company's business magazine; Joshua Eisenman, fellow for Asia at the American Foreign Policy Council; Devin Stewart, director of the Council's Global Policy Innovations program; and Alex Westlake, managing director of ClearWorld Energy's Beijing office.

The delegation's goal was to identify both the normative differences between China and the United States—differences that might lead Beijing and Washington to adopt different approaches to common international problems—and the similarities in ethical thinking that could promote cooperation and mutual understanding between our two countries.
Although we were invariably received with great courtesy, we found some of our Chinese colleagues to be quite skeptical about our mission. America's promotion of human rights is widely regarded as a way of attacking China's domestic policies or even of undermining China's domestic stability. In the same way, some of our interlocutors expressed their concern that a discussion of international norms was simply another American tactic for criticizing China's international conduct or a strategy aimed at forcing China to comply with U.S. foreign policy preferences.

We had to reassure them that we were open to a serious discussion of China's views, along with those of other non-Western countries, on the ethical basis for international conduct. Our goal was not primarily to press China to adopt the same international norms as the United States, but rather to gain a better understanding of the international norms that China espouses.

A common objection was the tendency to equate ethical considerations with ideological concerns, and then to contrast both of these to more pragmatic ways of thinking about policy choices. We were told on numerous occasions that Chinese are a "pragmatic" people who are uninterested in abstract discussions of ethics. The tacit assumption was that ethical thinking is impractical, and that pragmatism implies indifference to normative considerations. Deng Xiaoping's well known saying that "black cat or white cat, if it catches mice, it's a good cat" was frequently cited in support of this proposition.

We were puzzled by this argument, since we were well aware of China's rich ethical traditions. When we pursued the point, we were told that the Maoist era had significantly discredited ethical discourse in China. Mao's Cultural Revolution was characterized by a highly moralistic approach to politics that, in the end, associated ethical principles (particularly Mao's demand for continuing revolution against privilege and inequality) with an impractical and costly set of policy options (the denigration of expertise, an aversion to material incentives, and the dismantling of bureaucratic institutions). This led many Chinese to conclude that there is a fundamental incompatibility between thinking ethically and acting pragmatically.

When applied to foreign policy, this skeptical attitude toward ethics was reinforced by the realist tradition in international political theory—a theoretical tradition that is very comfortable for many Chinese. Realism holds that a country's foreign policy should be entirely based on an assessment of national interests, and it is inappropriate to impose normative considerations on what should properly be an interest-based behavior. Realism was said to be especially suitable for a developing country like China. Several of our Chinese colleagues described ethical considerations as a "luxury" reserved for rich and powerful countries. They asserted that poorer and weaker nations would have to do whatever was necessary to ensure their survival, whether or not it violated others' definitions of ethical behavior.

Although we heard much skepticism about applying ethical considerations to Chinese foreign policy, a number of Chinese colleagues expressed substantial interest.

In part, this interest reflected their concern about the costs that indifference to ethics was having on China's own society. We arrived in China just as the extent of the tainted milk scandal was becoming clear: Milk had been spiked with melamine as an inexpensive way of enhancing its protein content, but melamine can cause kidney failure in infants and kidney stones in children and older people. Many people realized that this contamination of milk products (and, it was later discovered, meat and other dairy products as well) reflected the dairy companies' unwillingness to allow ethical standards to hamper their quest for profits. We were told that the scandal, along with other similar scandals before it, was creating a growing interest in reconstructing an ethical foundation for Chinese society, drawing not only on China's past ethical traditions, but also on socialist norms and on Western ethical systems.

Although most of that discussion has so far been focused on the need to reintroduce ethical considerations to China's domestic affairs, some of our interlocutors acknowledged its relevance to foreign policy as well. But their interest in this question did not simply reflect the desire that their country adopt ethical standards of conduct for their own sake. There was also a two-pronged instrumental argument: that espousing norms of international behavior could enhance China's soft power, and that the invocation of ethical standards could legitimate its development and use of harder forms of power. As China grows in economic and military strength, simple reassurances of a peaceful rise will become less credible and persuasive than the argument that ethical considerations are shaping its international behavior. And, at the same time, ethical arguments can also be used to delegitimize the actions of one's competitors and rivals.

As the Chinese gradually rediscover the need to introduce ethical considerations into their foreign policy, what will those considerations be? The Chinese Communist Party has generally been attracted to the classic Westphalian norms of international affairs, particularly those norms that enshrine the autonomy of the nation-state against external pressures. In fact, the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, first formulated by Beijing in the mid-1950s, provide a concise summary of those norms: national sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-aggression, peaceful coexistence, non-intervention in another country's internal affairs, and equality and mutual benefit.

More recently, these norms have come into conflict with what might be called post-Westphalian norms that stress the right (and indeed the obligation) of the international community to infringe on the autonomy of the nation-state to protect or advance other considerations. Westphalian norms also stand in contrast to what the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes as the tendency to regard "social system, ideology, or the concept of values" as inevitably determining the relationship between nations.

The Westphalian norm of national sovereignty thus contrasts with the concept of humanitarian intervention or the responsibility to protect; territorial integrity with the more recent norm of self-determination; peaceful coexistence with international efforts to promote human rights in those countries where they are violated; equality with the principle that rogue states should be denied some rights of participation in the international community; and the norm of non-aggression with the use of military action to enforce international norms. Both Westphalian and non-Westphalian norms can easily be justified. Each set reflects a powerful ethical tradition. But they produce very different approaches to today's international problems.

Chinese leaders and policy analysts understand that these post-Westphalian norms make sense in a world in which a wide range of social, economic, and security issues span and erode the national borders that Westphalian principles hold sacrosanct. But they are not entirely comfortable with post-Westphalian ethics. They see post-Westphalian principles—like the principles of universal human rights with which they are associated—as a worrisome challenge to China's security and stability.

As they gradually develop a normative structure to guide their intentional behavior, Chinese leaders will therefore have to find a balance between the traditional Westphalian norms and the newer norms associated with a globalized world. In doing so, they will most likely find common ground with the United States on many issues but will differ on others. Either way, the need for further discussion of international norms between Chinese and Americans will prove to be a fruitful, even essential exercise.

The challenge of engaging Southeast Asia

I'm on a speaking tour of Southeast Asia -- visiting Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam -- to present the Asia Foundation's recommendations on American policy toward Asia, as contained in its recent report, America's Role in Asia, 2008: Asian and American Views. (The report is available on line at the foundation's website, at http://www.asiafoundation.org/program/overview/americas-role-in-asia.)

I'll write up my presentation, and report on some of the reactions to it, in a few days. Meanwhile, I thought I would post a presentation I gave back in October, on my last visit to Thailand, on the challenges the U.S. faces in trying to engage with Southeast Asia. This is drawn from the Asia Foundation's online blog, In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia, which can also be found on the foundation's website at http://asiafoundation.org/in-asia.

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Now that the U.S. presidential election is over, the incoming Obama administration will begin a reconsideration of American foreign policy. Numerous urgent issues will compete for attention, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, and the parlous state of the global economy. But consideration of these urgent matters should not come at the expense of issues that, while perhaps less immediate, are no less important. One of these is the American relationship with Southeast Asia.

There is a widely shared view, both in Southeast Asia and in the Asian policy community in the U.S., that the United States has been paying insufficient attention to the region. In introducing the Southeast Asia section of the Asia Foundation’s recently-released America’s Role in Asia report at a press conference in Washington last month Tommy Koh, Ambassador-At-Large at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Chairman of the Institute of Policy Studies, complained that Washington has been treating Southeast Asia with “benign neglect,” perhaps because the region has presented the U.S. with neither significant challenges nor great opportunities.

I’m not sure that the U.S. has completely neglected Southeast Asia, but I agree that our attention to the region has been highly selective. We focus on some countries more than others, and on some issues more than others. In particular, we pay attention to the region mainly when bigger issues – terrorism, the rise of China, avian flu – make it relevant. Still, from the Southeast Asian perspective, this selective attention is insufficient, especially when the issues we select are not what Southeast Asians want us to emphasize.

However we diagnose the problem – insufficient attention or selective attention – the solution will have to be more than electing a new president who lived in Indonesia as a child, or new members of Congress who may be more internationalist in their outlook or more knowledgeable about Southeast Asia. We also need to understand the structural obstacles that prevent the U.S. from treating Southeast Asia as it would like to be treated. In this regard, the basic problems are that the U.S. has to engage with the region on three different levels simultaneously, and doing so effectively may require more resources than the U.S. presently enjoys.

First, the U.S. must deal with each of the countries of the region bilaterally. Some say this is a matter of preference, in that the U.S. (like any great power) can find it easier to deal with each member of ASEAN individually than collectively, since it can dominate any particular pairing. But it is really a matter of necessity. ASEAN comprises ten very different countries – at different levels of development, with different political systems, and with different interests and perspectives. The U.S. must have separate relations with each Southeast Asian country, just as it has separate relations with each member of the EU.

At the same time, the United States also needs to deal with ASEAN as a regional organization that is seeking to develop a unified position on key regional and global issues, and then exert more influence by acting collectively. But ASEAN’s collective positions are taken largely through consensus, the development which can be a time-consuming process, and whose outcome can be frustrating to the U.S.

In addition, ASEAN seems to be saying that great powers like the United States that want to engage effectively with the organization should sign the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC). This poses a clear dilemma for Washington: would signing the TAC force the U.S. to accept the legitimacy of the government of Myanmar as a member of ASEAN? Would acceptance of the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs, which is included in the TAC, prevent the imposition of sanctions against Myanmar for its violations of basic human rights? Moreover, what would the U.S. get in return? How would American relations with ASEAN benefit from this gesture? Would the U.S., for example, be invited to join the East Asian Summit, which ASEAN has recently organized? And is this something that Washington would really want to do?

The East Asian Summit brings us to the third level at which the U.S. must engage with ASEAN: the super-regional organizations that ASEAN leads, none of which is as effective as the United States would like. The general problem is that the Southeast Asian view of these organizations appears to be more process-oriented than results-oriented. Southeast Asians value these organizations as ways of building personal relationships among leaders and officials, establishing what some call “habits of dialogue,” and gradually producing a sense of regional community. Americans, by comparison, are more practical and less patient in their outlook: they ask what the organization has produced, and whether it’s worth the time and effort that participation requires.

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is that most of the ASEAN-led organizations do not appear to be achieving the objectives that the U.S. would like to promote. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) seems to be far from creating a trans-Pacific free trade area of the sort the Bush Administration has endorsed, or even achieving the earlier goal of “freer trade” in the region. The ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) has neither taken up the tasks of preventive diplomacy or crisis management, nor done much to promote security cooperation on key transnational issues. Southeast Asian nations want America to pay more attention to these organizations, but the U.S. finds participation to be frustratingly non-productive. The East Asian Summit is too new to be expected to have achieved many results, but at this point even its agenda remains uncertain.

Thus, engaging with Southeast Asia is a demanding and sometimes frustrating job. And yet, the United States suffers from a shortage of both organizational resources and policy capabilities.

Take its foreign policy bureaucracy, for example. Much has been made of the fact that the U.S. government has recently created the position of an ambassador for ASEAN – the first major power to do so. But, in fact, no additional personnel line has been created inside the State Department; the title has simply been given to the Deputy Assistant Secretary who is already responsible for Southeast Asia. Above this position, no one in the State Department has any full-time responsibility for the region. The same situation is basically repeated in the other key agencies responsible for foreign affairs, like the National Security Council, Department of Defense, and USTR. Nowhere in the US government is Southeast Asia the full-time responsibility of any official above the rank of deputy assistant secretary. And those higher-level officials are preoccupied with issues that are regarded as more urgent (like North Korea) or more important (like Japan and China).

As a result, the US government suffers from a lack of bandwidth in dealing with Southeast Asia. But organizational bandwidth is not the foreign policy resource in short supply in the United States these days. The US military – particularly the army and marines – is overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan. The financial crisis, and the economic recession is will almost certainly produce, will place significant constraints on America’s national defense and foreign affairs budgets. The U.S. will be a less abundant source of capital for Southeast Asia, and a less vital market for the region’s exports – although a global economic slowdown might mean that America’s economic role in the region will decline only in absolute, but not relative, terms. If the recession leads to greater protectionism in the US – an outcome that is not certain, but also cannot be ruled out – trade in both directions could decline still further.

Although the election of Barack Obama may help restore U.S. prestige in the eyes of many Asians, it will take some time to reverse the overall decline in America’s soft power. While the election of our first black president has underscored the vitality of America’s political institutions, another key element of our domestic story –a prosperous free economy overseen by effective governmental regulation – has been significantly undermined by the financial crisis. And our international story – as a generous supporter of Third World development, a credible guarantor of international security, and a promoter of free trade – may also be contradicted by the consequences of the recession.

In short, Southeast Asia is understandably and appropriately asking for greater attention from the United States. It is asking that American policy not define Southeast Asian countries simply as a counterweight against China (not a role that it wants to highlight), or as partners in the global war on terror (not an issue that it wishes to be the central feature of U.S. policy), or as candidates for free trade agreements with the United States (a status not all can achieve). Pointing to its importance strategically and economically, Southeast Asia wants the U.S. to pay attention to a wider range of countries and issues.

But engaging with Southeast Asia is not easy, since the U.S. will have to do so on three different levels – bilateral, regional, and supra regional – simultaneously. It will also strain America’s governmental attention span, when other more urgent issues demand attention from top foreign policy officials. And calls for greater engagement will come up against the reality that, for at least in the near term, the U.S. will be overstretched militarily, constrained financially, and enjoying less soft power than might once have been the case.

The challenge for the U.S. is to conduct a smarter foreign policy, doing more with less.