Word: southeasterly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 Asians that their futures are more tied to a giant across the Pacific than one closer to home. (See pictures of how Indonesia thrived under the dictator Suharto...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...