Michael Vatikiotis: East Asia club leaves U.S. feeling left out
International Herald Tribune
April 6, 2005

Why are Americans so nervous about the emerging East Asian Community? U.S. officials and experts have started wringing their hands over the proposed formation of a group uniting East Asian countries, which will be cemented in place at a summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur at the end of this year.
 
What surprises many East Asians is that apparently the United States wants to be included in the group. America? A part of Asia? The core members of the community - China, Japan, South Korea and the 10 countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations - are having a tough enough time deciding whether India and Australia should be members.
 
The American nervousness stems from two areas of concern - one rational, the other perhaps not.
 
Early formulations of an East Asian Community were forged when Asia's economies were booming and leaders like Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia dreamed of Asia for Asians. Mahathir's notion of an East Asian Economic Caucus, first mooted in the early 1990s, was deliberately pitched as a counterbalance to America's economic dominance.
 
Washington didn't like the idea, and urged Asian nations to embrace instead the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, or APEC, which fudged the geography and included all of Asia's trading partners - including the Pacific rim of Latin America.
 
When the Asian financial crisis struck in 1997, talk of regional financial cooperation acquired a new urgency because of the way that Western-dominated markets had punished profligate Asian economies using the International Monetary Fund. Japan mooted the idea of an Asian Monetary Fund. Hell no, America said, entrusting our capital to some kind of Asian monetary fund was out of the question - so East Asian cooperation received another body blow.
 
But as China grew stronger in the late 1990s, the idea of an East Asian Community was revived with the help of more subtle Chinese diplomacy. The modest marriage of summit meetings in 1999 between Asean and the three Northeast Asian powers has since evolved into an ambitious community that China wants to see embrace trade, finance, politics and security.
 
This is where American objections become harder to justify, because they seem to be based on old-fashioned hegemonic competition rather than sensible economics.
 
The United States sees itself as an assertive power for the good in the world. Implicitly, America questions whether China can or should play the same role. "China is becoming a significant power in the region," the new head of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral William Fallon, told The Associated Press. "I don't know what the desired end state is. I'm not sure they do either."
 
Oh yes they do. "The purpose of the East Asia Community is to realize the group rising of East Asia and match the potential of North America, the European Union and South America against the backdrop of global competition," says one Chinese scholar from a Shanghai university.
 
The unspoken fear in Washington is that an East Asian Community that excludes the United States could become the core of an alliance against it. One senior U.S. official described his fear of a wall around Asia "with slots for us to put our money in."
 
To which the Chinese say: nonsense. We'll let you become a member of our club if you let us become a member of yours. China is dangling closer ties with the new group in return for membership of some of the elite global clubs that regulate, for example, weapons technology and nuclear power.
 
One way America could start to feel more integrated with East Asia without yielding too much strategic ground would be to pay more attention to those East Asian forums of which it is already a member. The Asean Regional Forum, a security body set up in the early 1990s, has never acquired any teeth because Washington neglected it. The APEC process has also languished because of U.S. neglect.
 
While China and America spar over geopolitical pre-eminence, the rest of East Asia just wants a more efficient trading area and access to a larger market. And right now, the biggest market is China.
 
So many East Asians are saying to their American friends: Don't fight this one. Let us evolve on our own. Besides, the region can hardly afford to ignore America. Despite American fears, East Asia won't stop doing business with America after the December summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur.

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