Author: Peter Drsydale

The flurry of leaders’ visits — by Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to Canberra this week and American President Barack Obama to Canberra and Jakarta a little over a week later — signals an elevation in the triangular relationship between the United States, Indonesia and Australia, not merely the growing depth of their bilateral relations. Indonesia is one of the world’s newest democracies, a secular state with a predominantly Muslim population, of immense importance to Australia and America in securing Southeast Asian stability and openness. Indonesia and Australia are members of the new G20 group and have deep and common interests in working with America to entrench the G20 as the pre-eminent and enduring forum for global economic governance. Indonesia, with its pivotal role in ASEAN, and Australia, an anchor in trans-Pacific security, are close confidants on America’s re-engagement with Asia under the Obama administration.

American conceptions of security in Asia and the Pacific do not routinely comprehend Southeast Asia. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Andrew MacIntyre, ANU

Barack Obama’s upcoming visit to Indonesia and Australia is likely to be one of the less difficult and more gratifying international missions he undertakes this year. But along with the surges of goodwill that will greet him in both countries, there will also be opportunities– in partnership with Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Kevin Rudd – to advance significant common causes in the region and globally. And Yudhoyono’s separate bilateral visit to Canberra the week before gives added weight to the moment.

With climate change sliding down the agenda in all three countries for now, the big issue on which the three leaders will find common cause is the G20. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Christopher Findlay, Adelaide University

Balanced, inclusive, sustainable and knowledge-based – these are the dimensions of growth which APEC is talking about. Put their first letters together and you get BISK.

This agenda comes out of a number of forces for change, including the response to the global financial crisis, the concerns which have been raised about the distribution of the benefits of growth within economies (and between them), the intersection of these developments with the climate change debate, and the twittering rate of technological change in the digital world. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Hitoshi Tanaka, JCIE

Over the past several years, and especially since September’s historic change of government in Japan, it has become clear that there is a need to reassess the US-Japan alliance to ensure that it is equipped to face the challenges of the 21st century. There have been changes in Japan that are now reflected in domestic politics, but we cannot ignore the fact that there have been important changes in the regional context as well. China’s rise is apparent to everyone, and there is now a consensus view that East Asia is becoming an engine of growth whose dynamism is benefiting the world.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has spoken frequently of two lofty concepts that arise out of a recognition that the regional context has changed: the desirability of forging an ‘East Asian community’ and the need to have a more equal US-Japan relationship. What is missing in this talk, however, is a clear articulation of how to link the goals of a strong and more balanced US-Japan relationship with a vision of regional community that is equipped to deal with the changes unfolding before us. Although some observers may see these aims as inconsistent or even mutually exclusive, they can be complementary. In fact, effectively coordinating them should be the focus of intense and forward-looking discussions between Japan and the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Claude Barfield, AEI

Recently, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Philip Levy and I published an International Economic Outlook, entitled ‘Tales of the South Pacific: President Obama and the Transpacific Partnership.’ In this analysis, we made the case for the Obama administration to move with dispatch in asserting U.S. leadership in the construction of a new Asian economic architecture that would be broad and inclusive. And we argued that the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) agreement was an ideal vehicle through which to achieve this goal.

Since then, bolder moves by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have increased the urgency for the Obama administration to advance a strategic vision of the U.S. role in a nascent Asian economic architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Van Ness, ANU

In East Asia, ‘the times they are a-changing,’ and the pundits are full of speculation about what the new ‘architecture’ for the region will look like. After the Democratic Party of Japan’s historic electoral defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party in August, the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has the opportunity to take the country in new directions, but it is unclear whether it will have the vision and determination to prevail. America, the world’s only superpower, is in serious trouble, and meanwhile China is on the rise. The focus is on how relations between United States and China will work out, and a discussion of new forms of multilateralism. Often ignored in these discussions, however, is the key role of Japan. Japan is too rich and too powerful to be left out. Whatever the future of East Asia, Japan will have to be a founding participant. In my view, Japan is an indispensable power in the region.

The Japanese are worried about the rise of China, but they worry even more about how to manage their relations with their post-World War II security guarantor, the U.S. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Claude Barfield and Philip I. Levy, AEI

After prolonged ambivalence about trade, President Obama finally found an agreement he could embrace – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). But what is the object of the President’s new found passion? Why has the South Pacific caught his fancy when pending agreements in Latin America and Northeast Asia could not? And will this amount to anything more than the Administration’s rather empty promises to wrap up the Doha Round of WTO global trade talks?

In fact, the TPP is potentially a significant addition to U.S. trade policy. It could be a model for trade liberalisation and a means to address long-standing U.S. interests in Asia. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Author: John Hemmings, RUSI

Hatoyama’s plan for an East Asian Community, first mentioned in a September 2009 op-ed in the New York Times, is an interesting symbol of the split personality in Japanese foreign policy. Almost from the first, the idea raised hackles in both Beijing and in Washington, who view Japanese leadership and independence in the region warily for different reasons. In the article, Hatoyama tied together two arguments: that Japan needed to redress the imbalance in its relationship with the United States, and that Japan was an Asian power and should contribute to any discussion of regional architecture. The first statement raised hackles in Washington while the second raised hackles in Beijing. Naturally, Hatoyama’s point that Japan’s ‘proper place of being’ is as an Asian power which should shape the destiny of one of world’s fastest growing regions makes perfect sense from a Japanese point of view.

How can Japan’s sudden support for regional integration be explained? Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Reinhard Drifte

After the Koizumi era, particularly since the beginning of the Hatoyama cabinet, Japan’s relations with China seem to be improving, and both sides have made encouraging statements. Nevertheless, there are many contrasting developments that demonstrate the continuing fragility of the relationship.

For the Japanese, there is a feeling that somehow bilateral problems will be resolved because both sides agree about the importance of a good relationship for their own national interests, Read the rest of this entry »

Guest Author: David Brewster

The recent imbroglio over the apparent endorsement by the United States of China’s strategic role in South Asia can only contribute to India’s increasing insecurities over China.  The official Sino-US joint statement which followed President Obama’s visit to China mid-November has infuriated New Delhi and raised legitimate questions about the US commitment to strategic partnership with India.

What incensed New Delhi was the apparent recognition by the United States of a strategic role for China in South Asia, including suggestions that it may play some sort of honest broker role between India and Pakistan.  Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Andrew Elek on behalf of the Australian Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation (AUSPECC)

On December 4-5, 2009, the Australian Government convened a ‘one-and-a-half track conference’ of prominent government officials, academics and opinion makers. In this week’s digest, Peter Drysdale reports on the meeting which discussed the form an Asia Pacific community might take and the role of existing forums (including APEC) within evolving regional institutional architecture.

Drysdale and Hadi Soesastro have made a useful recommendation for how Prime Minister Rudd’s proposal, could be advanced by a council of the leaders of the G20 members of APEC, together with India. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Peter Drysdale

From Thursday through to Saturday last week almost 200 officials, academics and commentators from around the Asia Pacific region gathered at the invitation of the Australian Government to talk about Prime Minister Rudd’s idea of an Asia Pacific Community at the 2009 Asia-Pacific community Conference. This was the one-and-a-half track dialogue that Rudd had promised to convene at the Shangri-la meeting in Singapore in September.

Whether or not Mr Rudd won over their minds to his proposal, as one of the more sceptical guests observed, he certainly won over the hearts of each and every participant. He did this by paying careful attention to ASEAN sensibilities about the idea in his opening address and with his warm personal and individual hospitality at Kirribilli House.

What did the conference deliver on substance? Read the rest of this entry »

Authors: Hadi Soesastro (CSIS, Jakarta) and Peter Drysdale (ANU, Canberra)

The idea that regional architecture in Asia and the Pacific is not up to the tasks it now needs to serve has been around for some time. It has been inspired in part by worries about the untidiness in the competing structures — across the Pacific, of APEC, and within East Asia, of ASEAN +3 and the East Asia Summit (EAS). There has also been a hankering after ‘robust’ regional institutions modelled on the arrangements in Europe or North America, however unsuited they are to Asia Pacific circumstances.

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What is different about the thinking that led to Prime Minister Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community proposal is that these worries are incidental to its main strategic motivation. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Luke Nottage, Australian Network for Japanese Law

Imagine a transnational regime with these institutional features:

• Virtually free trade in goods and services, including a ‘mutual recognition’ system whereby compliance with regulatory requirements in one jurisdiction (such as qualifications to practice law or requirements when offering securities) basically means exemption from compliance with regulations in the other jurisdiction. And for sensitive areas, such as food safety, there is a trans-national regulator.

• Virtually free movement of capital, underpinned by private sector and governmental initiatives. Read the rest of this entry »

Author: Deborah Elms, Temasek Foundation Centre for Trade & Negotiations, Singapore

The ambiguity in U.S. President Barack Obama’s November 13th statement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks mirrors the somewhat torturous path in American trade policy to date on this topic. In his speech in Tokyo, President Obama said, ‘The United States will also be engaging with the Trans-Pacific partnership countries with the goal of shaping a regional agreement that will have broad-based membership and the high standards worthy of a 21st century trade agreement.’

Listeners in the audience could be forgiven for confusion. Was the United States in or out? What did the President mean by ‘engage’?

Read the rest of this entry »