Author: Nina Hachigian, Center for American Progress, Washington
President Obama’s first steps in 2009 reveal a U.S. committed to reenergizing the role of the U.S. in Asia and set U.S.-Asian relations on a promising path.
Obama’s tenure began with an important symbolic gesture: The first trip that Hillary Clinton took as Secretary of State was to Asia, not Europe, where her predecessors for the last forty years had gone first. A few months later, without a great deal of fanfare, the Administration signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, which paved the way for President Obama, in November, to become the first American president to attend an ASEAN summit. This, too, was an important symbol that America would re-focus on Asia, show-up, and take Asia’s regional institutions seriously.
In terms of America’s treaty allies, Japan’s elections were momentous, and while U.S.-Japan relations under the new DJP government have not been entirely smooth sailing, these are still early days, and in time they are likely to work themselves out. Read more…
Author: Nina Hachigian, Center for American Progress & Bruce Jones, Brookings Institution
The agenda for this week’s meeting of the Group of 20 developed and developing nations is full, but when the leaders of all these countries sit down in Pittsburgh to discuss banking regulation, energy and poverty alleviation, one question will not be on the table—the question of who should be at the table in the first place.
Deciding which nations will sit at the global decision-making table is more politically charged than whether to tie bankers’ bonuses to the risks they take or whether countries can and should stop subsidizing fossil fuel consumption. Resolving which nations will try to forge consensus on these and other critical questions, however, is key to determining whether any resolving actually gets done.
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Author: Nina Hachigian, Center for American Progress
By all accounts, planning for the Group of 8 Summit-polooza in Italy was disastrous. Complex logistics were one problem. After Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi decided to allow PR considerations to trump sanity and move the location of the summit to earthquake-stricken L’Aquila, tremor measurements and evacuation plans dominated the news coverage.
Another cloud was Berlusconi the man, who has been plagued by multiple scandals, the most recent involving very young women with very few clothes. But the underlying trouble is the G-8 itself. The world simply needs a different set of countries at the high table of global governance to tackle today’s challenges.
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Author: Nina Hachigian, Center for American Progress
Less than a month into the new Obama administration and the Secretary of State was on the ground in Asia.
Add that to the growing list of acts, symbolic and real, that signal a major departure from the last eight years of American policymaking.
Already, ‘green jobs’ are actually being created, not just debated as a concept, and the Secretary of Energy is a Nobel Prize winning scientist who speaks forcefully about the devastating potential of climate change. Women now enjoy broader rights to sue over unequal pay, millions more American children have access to health insurance, two additional brigades are on their way to Afghanistan and the CIA can no longer torture detainees.
Asia policy is unlikely to undergo as radical a change. But the fact that Secretary Clinton was there on her very first overseas trip when Condolezza Rice didn’t even regularly attend ASEAN summits, certainly shows a different kind of appreciation for the enormous importance of the region to the US.
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Author: Nina Hachigian, Center for American Progress
The debate about whether to engage China is over – we are now about 20 years into a common-law marriage. The debate about whether China will join the international community is also over. Beijing has been signing up for multilateral forums as if they were going out of style. The great challenge for the US Secretary of State Clinton is to influence China to play a larger role in preventing global catastrophes in these areas: the economy, nuclear proliferation, climate change and pandemic disease.
China deserves high marks for acting quickly on the global economic crisis. Beijing turned on a dime from trying to cool down its economy last summer to enacting potentially potent stimulus measures over the last months. Some measures, such as a plan to invest $123 billion in universal health insurance over the next three years, could lay the foundation for a social safety net that will help establish a broad Chinese middle class, which would support the growth of the American middle class by fostering a robust market for U.S. exports. Moreover, working with the International Monetary Fund, Beijing is helping to bail out Pakistan, whose economic stability the United States is concerned about, to put it mildly.
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