Word: partly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Indonesia is ASEAN's largest economy. It is also where Obama spent part of his childhood, snacking on his favorite bakso meatballs and learning the local language. (In Singapore, the U.S. President is slated to hold a bilateral meeting with his Indonesian counterpart Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.) But the U.S. President's scheduled joint appearance with ASEAN leaders is about more than childhood sentimentality. For decades, the U.S. held a comfortable position as ASEAN's third-largest trading partner. No more. China displaced America last year. Even with persuasion from the popular U.S. President, it will be hard to convince Southeast...
...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...
...Part of the problem, too, is the distance with which the U.S. held ASEAN in recent years. While China, India, Australia and other regional economies have been assiduously wooing Southeast Asia by signing free-trade agreements with the bloc, the U.S., particularly under the presidency of George W. Bush, kept ASEAN at arm's length. One reason was Burma's accession to ASEAN in 1997, which put the U.S. in a tough spot. Washington had been tightening sanctions on the Burmese junta because of its dismal human-rights record. By participating in ASEAN confabs, Bush's State Department worried that...
Obama's Administration moved quickly to change the mood. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took part in the ASEAN regional forum earlier this year, pointedly announcing that ?the U.S. is back in Southeast Asia.? Since then Washington has designated an Ambassador to ASEAN, and its Southeast Asia love-fest will culminate with the Nov. 15 summit between Obama and the 10 regional leaders...
...clenched hands tell only part of the story, beyond which new tensions add pressure to the relationship between the world's two largest national economies. Hatoyama's "change" campaign, for example, which shifted party control in Japan for the first time in a half-century, was marked in part by a more aggressive posture toward the United States. As he appealed for votes, Hatoyama spoke of seeking a more equal relationship" with America, a phrase that implied a continuation of the postwar subjugation of Japan...