America in Asia: Emerging Architecture for a Pacific Community

James A. Baker, III

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1991/92

Article preview: first 500 of 6,341 words total.

Summary:  "First, we need a framework for economic integration that will support an open global trading system in order to sustain the region's economic dynamism and avoid regional economic fragmentation. Second, we must foster the trend towrds democratization so as to deepen the shared values that will reinforce a sense of community, enhance economic vitality and minimize prospects for dictatorial adventures. Third, we need to define a renewed defense structure for the Asia-Pacific theater that reflects the region's diverse security concerns and mitigates intra-regional fears and suspicions".

James A. Baker, III is Secretary of State.

In Asia as in Europe we are in the midst of the first transformation of the international system this century that is not the direct result of global conflagration. This rare moment presents us with new possibilities for reshaping international relationships in Asia to meet the challenges of the post-Cold War world.

President Bush's trip to East Asia marks a point in time when disparate historical lines are intersecting: the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor; the end of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation; and the prospect of laying to rest the Vietnam War era. The end of 1991 should see the closing off of several tragic, defining episodes of the American experience in Asia and open a new chapter of U.S. engagement in the region as we approach the 21st century.

I have presented elsewhere the administration's ideas about the new post-Cold War architecture of the Euro-Atlantic community.1 But America's destiny lies no less across the Pacific than the Atlantic. We have fought three major wars over the past half-century in the Asia-Pacific theater. U.S. economic involvement and defense commitments in the region have been-and remain-defining realities. We also have large and growing interests in the human and material development of the region, as well as in its security. Our success in forging a new international system will require sustained engagement in this diverse and dynamic part of the world, just as it does in Europe and the Americas.

The global trends that are reshaping Europe and the Soviet Union have also been at work in the Asia-Pacific region: the bankruptcy of communism as an economic and political system; a movement toward democracy and market-oriented economics; global economic integration of markets for trade, capital and information; and the emerging recognition that transnational challenges in such areas as narcotics, the environment and migration are important components of a comprehensive approach to security. At the same time the dark countertrends that President Bush pointed to in his September 1991 speech to the U.N. General Assembly are also evident in Asia: the reemergence of ethnic rivalries, nationalist aspirations and territorial or political disputes which were suppressed during the Cold War years.

II

These global factors for change are playing themselves out in Asia amid the region's particular historical, cultural and political circumstances. In contrast to central and eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R., where change has been driven by the failure of a system of political economy, much of the ferment in Asia is a product of the region's unique and dramatic economic success. Barely twenty years ago East Asia was engulfed in war and great-power confrontation, burdened with poverty and challenged by insurgent communist movements. Our trade with the region in the early 1970s was less than that with Latin America.

But the subsequent two decades brought unrivaled progress. Throughout the 1980s East Asia led the world in the innovations of a new economic age. Japan emerged as an economic superpower. New industrial economies of South Korea, Taiwan, ...

End of preview: first 500 of 6,341 words total.