Word: asian
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...shake on his inaugural trip to Asia as U.S. President will be that of a soft-spoken general who happens to represent one of the world's most repressive regimes. Obama's planned joint appearance on Nov. 15 with Burmese Prime Minister Thein Sein, at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations' confab on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Singapore, will mark the first time since the era of Lyndon B. Johnson that an American President has spent any face-time with a member of the Burmese junta that has ruled since...
...brief meet-and-greet will underscore a major shift in American foreign policy toward the Southeast Asian nation, renamed Myanmar by its ruling generals. For decades the U.S. has shunned contact with the Burmese military regime and in recent years has tightened financial sanctions on its leaders for their murderous treatment of their citizens. (In the most recent crackdown in 2007, security forces gunned down dozens of Buddhist monks and other peaceful protesters...
...part of the policy shift, Kurt Campbell, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, visited Burma earlier this month - the first such high-level tour in nearly 15 years. In a significant concession, Campbell was allowed to meet for two hours with the opposition leader and Nobel Peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Her party won by a landslide in 1990 elections that the junta then ignored; and her continued detention has angered the West. But not everyone was available to meet Campbell: junta supremo General Than Shwe stayed holed up in his army...
...meeting in Singapore is only scheduled to last 90 minutes. But in that hour and a half, U.S. President Barack Obama will do much to erase years of perceived American slights felt by 10 Asian nations. For the first time ever, an American President will meet in one room with every leader of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a regional grouping that began in 1967 largely as a U.S.-supported bulwark against communism...
...didn't boycott the United Nations just because countries like North Korea or Sudan were members. And, in truth, Burma wasn't the only factor. With more pressing foreign-policy priorities in the Middle East, Washington was naturally distracted from courting other parts of the globe. Nonetheless Southeast Asian ministers couldn't help but spot a deliberate snub when then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice skipped two ASEAN summits that historically had been attended by a U.S. envoy...