Word: southeasterly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...almost accidental, way. Abdullah Badawi, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, offered to host an East Asia summit: ASEAN plus three - the three being China, Japan and South Korea. China's premier, Wen Jiabao, then offered to host the second summit. That would move the center of gravity away from Southeast to Northeast Asia and make some countries anxious. We agreed that we should also invite India, Australia and New Zealand and keep the center in ASEAN; also, India would be a useful balance to China's heft. This is a getting-together of countries that believe their economic and cultural...
...TIME: So is nationalism - rather than its political system, or the build-up of its military, or the destabilizing role the Chinese Communist Party once played in Southeast Asia - the main reason behind the suspicion about China? LEE: The discomfort [with China] is primarily that it is becoming a very powerful country and that it's not averse to making its power felt. For instance, when we did not sufficiently make amends for having visited Taiwan, they just froze all economic ties at the official level. We are a very small part of their economy, but they are a significant...
...Middle East. The problem in Iraq is very grave. If the jihadists win there, I'm in trouble here. [Their attitude will be]: We've beaten the Russians in Afghanistan, we've beaten the Americans and the coalition in Iraq. There's nothing we cannot do. We can fix Southeast Asia too. There will be such a surge of confidence for all jihadists. The U.S. must be seen?if not to have prevailed or to have created a democratic Iraq?to at least to have denied the jihadists a victory. Because otherwise the consequences for America and for the world...
...engagement in Asia. At the same time, you have been a pretty sharp critic, to put it mildly, of internal American society. LEE: Because they want to impose certain values on me that would make it very difficult to govern a Singapore in the middle of a Muslim Southeast Asia. Sometimes, intellectually, I've got to give it as hard as they give it to me. It's important that we do that, because we intend to stand our ground with the Chinese and with our bigger neighbors. We are small, we are vulnerable, we can be destroyed...
...summit may not live up to its hype; few such gatherings do. But it is not unreasonable to see the meeting in Kuala Lumpur as a punctuation mark in the 60-year-long progress of Asia. The leaders of the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will meet together with those of Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand - and China. The U.S will not be present. Some of the more breathless commentary on the summit sees parallels to the meeting of European leaders in Messina in 1955, which laid the foundations for what has become...