The Chinese Century

Since Commodore Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay, the United States has been the principle Pacific power. Not anymore. I've been saying for a while that the withdrawal of US influence from South East Asia is causing these countries to look to China as regional leader rather than the United States. Here's another way to look at this trend,

[T]he Chinese are securing their own backyard in the way the United States secured Latin and Central America in the early 19th century under the Monroe Doctrine...

"Ninety percent of the time, the U.S. is cooperative with its neighbors. This enhances stability and allows commerce to flourish. Everyone gets rich. But on occasion Washington takes off the gloves and acts like the true hegemon it is.

"They don't like the government in Panama, boom! They take it down and start over."

...They are behaving like a great power and ensuring they control the neighborhood. In this case, China is also intent on making sure that the region's commodities - oil and minerals - are locked in for China's urgent energy needs.

The United States has been the dominant player in the Pacific for a long, long time, and has traditionally opposed this type of power play in our backyard. We destroyed Spanish influence in the region and strong-armed the Chinese into an "open door" trade policy at the dawn of the last century, and we dismantled Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in WWII.

Now, we're letting the Democratic Peoples Republic of China take the lead on all the regional issues, including dismantling North Korea's nuclear weapons program and slapping down Taiwan every time they talk of independence.

At the summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations here, rather incongruously held in the poorest of the region's capitals, [Chinese Prime Minister] Wen [Jaibao] did not explicitly say that the United States was not welcome in the East Asian community.

But that was the implicit message. His vision treats Washington as an outside power, not excluded but not part of the intrinsic Asian structures.

Is that what we really want - China shaping the Pacific economic and political environment? Other than North Korea, Bush's foreign policy has been notably lacking an Asia dimension. The Bush administration seems "satisfied with the basic contours of its Asia policy," but a geopolitical situation doesn't maintain the status quo by itself. It requires constant attention, and that's something SE Asia isn't getting from the United States right now. Thus China is filling the power vacuum.

Except for Iraq, the Bush administration has consistently been reactionary, rather than proactive in its foreign policy. Is the Bush administration engaged in some sort of neo-isolationism, or is it merely a lack of vision and leadership?