This anxiety in America has deep roots in the political psychology of the response to the changes taking place in Asia and the challenges they present to American projection. But it is also fed by fears that Asia is making its own strategic choices that might exclude America, economically and politically, if nothing is done to seize the moment.  These fears, as is fairly plain for anyone on the ground out here to see, are premature. But they play, powerfully, into the need to act.

In the first of two lead essays this week, Ernest Bower, correctly, sees high noon in November, after the elections and by the time of the first Asian G20 meeting in Seoul and the APEC Leaders Meetings in Yokohama. November defines the challenge, Bower says, for US policy in Asia. Bower focuses on the need to follow through with a second ASEAN-US Summit. That’s important in its own right, especially for Obama. But ASEAN is part of a much larger American play in Asia, now forcing its way, despite the odds, onto the policy radar screen in Washington.  How should Washington relate to proposals for re-positioning and strengthening East Asian and trans-Pacific architecture?  How should it assess Hatoyama’s East Asian Community idea and Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community idea?  President Obama will want to lay down markers of all this when he visits Australia and Indonesia in a couple of months.

Don Emmerson, in his lead essay this week reminds us that such choices are conditioned by time and space. The East Asia Summit has been meeting without the United States since 2005. The Obama administration, unable to travel back in time to the Summit’s creation, can only be present or absent at its maturation. Nor can the US play an insider’s part, the role of a local, in the growth of an East Asian regional order. It does not need to be involved in all the detail of the East Asian economic integration effort. It has neither the interests nor the executive time for hands-on management of that process, one that is more effectively embedded in broader regional and global arrangements and a closer American watch.  Nor should America fear at this time that there is any one of influence in the capitals of Asia, including Beijing,  who does not see it as integral to the successful evolution of a new Asian order and its place in the world.

So the question is what is the best way to capture America’s interests together with those of the region in a way that will work, that will not stumble over what is being  done in Asia that is useful and that does no damage America’s credibility as a serious partner. Being there, as Bower says, is 90 per cent of the game. That means commitments and a set of arrangements on which the US President can deliver and of which he can be part without over-stretch. The answer to this question of what will work is not entirely clear. There is more at stake that just getting the ASEAN relationship sorted, important though that is in itself and there are more options in this broader game than Bower suggests. Wisely, Washington appears to have taken a step back from the advice that it should jump in and join the East Asia Summit process. That never made sense, logistically for the American President or strategically for the focus in American interests. It would be an ill-considered move. That doesn’t mean that a framework for dialogue between the US and members of the EAS is not an appropriate target. But membership would burden the US and divert the East Asian integration enterprise in ways that are unlikely to be helpful to America or the region.

The wise way forward is step-by-step, through new informal dialogues around what we have in East Asia and in APEC. There is opportunity enough for that this year if we can move quickly enough. America hosts APEC in Honolulu next year, offering the chance for carry-through.