Rise of the new Pacific powers

A relaxed and cheerful George W. Bush, on his final presidential trip to east Asia, seemed visibly relieved on Thursday to be leaving behind the vexatious foreign policy challenges that go with his office.

Delivering an Asia policy speech in Bangkok before attending Friday’s opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Mr Bush jokingly recalled Thailand’s historical habit of giving inconveniently large elephants to its allies and reminisced about the enthusiasm for Elvis Presley evinced by Junichiro Koizumi, the former Japanese prime minister.

More importantly, Mr Bush was able to assert truthfully that relations between the US and Asia have improved during his eight years in the White House.

He summarised all that has gone right for trans-Pacific ties, including a rise in two-way trade to more than $1,000bn last year, a lessening of tension in the Taiwan Strait and the forging of stronger relations between the US and several Asian democracies.

Mr Bush predictably condemned the weak and isolated regimes of North Korea and Burma, and cautiously criticised the rather more powerful government of China for suppressing political and religious freedom, earning an equally predictable and formulaic response from Beijing rejecting interference in China’s internal affairs.

Sino-US relations have certainly improved since the early and confrontational days of the first Bush administration in 2001, when a US EP3 spy plane was forced to land in China after a fatal collision with a Chinese jet fighter.

The suspicion remains, however, that the benign state of US-Asia ties today is as much the result of luck as of design. In focusing their energies on Iraq and the Middle East, Mr Bush and his team neglected Asia – and were indeed criticised for doing so by some of their smaller Asian allies. Ironically, that seems to have allowed flows of trade and investment, unimpeded by politics, further to bind together the two sides of the Pacific.

And for all Mr Bush’s talk of liberty, democracy and the rule of law (a message undermined in any case by detention without trial in Guantánamo Bay and the torture of prisoners in Iraq), he has in fact retreated on matters of principle before the advancing Asian powers of India and China.

The US administration was so eager to befriend India that it struck a controversial and arguably illegal deal that would – if ratified by all sides – allow the supply of civilian nuclear technology to India in spite of its refusal to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As for China, the country is now so powerful an economic and political force that Mr Bush has bowed to the Communist party’s wishes and will neither meet political dissidents nor worship in an unapproved church during his visit to Beijing.

Militarily, the US will remain pre-eminent for many years, but it is nevertheless a Pacific superpower in relative decline. Mr Bush, who has had to deal with this uncomfortable reality, can perhaps take comfort from the knowledge that his successor as US president will face exactly the same problem.