Listen to Asia Carefully
By Tom Plate
President Barack Hussein Obama's self-proclaimed proclivity for listening does not necessarily prove that he is a good listener. The art of listening is more than a passive act.
Meanings must be carefully monitored and processed as words are received and acknowledged. The proof of the listening comes in the payoff on policy. Do we Americans learn from others as well as just listen?
Obama's recent streak across Europe provided the new U.S. President with plenty to listen to. In France there's an old saying about their much loved language to the effect that the ``French have a word for it."
During Obama's time in Europe, though, it seemed as if that grandstanding blowhard, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, had more than a few words to say regarding just about everything.
The French connection to Europe is in fact deeply revealing. If Obama did listen carefully there, he would have heard a whole lot of talking from all the European super-egos ― but very little action.
He wanted a lot more help on Afghanistan, for example, and got back precious little in return. ``This effort cannot be America's alone," he said. But judging from the crumbs produced by the Europeans, who allegedly are as vulnerable to from extremists operating out of Afghanistan as we are such effort, more or less, will have to be from us alone.
There was a perverse beauty to the Europe's response. Its educational value to the new President had to be enormous and striking. The mark it should have left on the Presidential mind should be indelible.
It is this: As the U.S. economy is restructured (in the wake of the collapse), and as American foreign policy is reconfigured (into what perhaps may become known as the post-Iraq era), Europe must continue to be listened to and consulted, of course, but with the understanding that it has less and less to contribute to America's 21st century future.
Obama needs to fully absorb this reality, face it, and then turn in the direction of its true future: toward Asia. America needs to listen more to our Asian friends and competitors while not turning a rude deaf ear to anyone.
The reason is sheer numbers ― and thus geopolitical weight. Put the economies and populations of just India, China and Japan together, and next to that, colossus Europe is a peanut farm.
It's a pity that after Obama's return from the trip, the U.S. media was filled with enormously boring analyses and commentaries about the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The fact of the matter is that as long as NATO doesn't somehow help Russian justify some kind of aggression, it's basically yesterday's institution. It's almost of no importance.
Far more consequential to America is an Asia-based organization that few Americans have ever heard of and which few members of the American media can decode out of its acronym. It's ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and it needs to replace, in the American geopolitical mind, the hallowed spot heretofore reserved for NATO.
Rightly rues Singapore's Kishore Mahbubani, the widely respected former U.N. ambassador and current dean of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, who may be the most sagacious geopolitical mind writing in English of our time: ``President George W. Bush abruptly cancelled his participation in the 2007 U.S.-ASEAN Summit, which celebrated 30 years of U.S.-ASEAN partnership, in favor of a 24-hour photo op in Baghdad."
``American Secretaries of State have frequently skipped the annual ASEAN ministerial meetings. These decisions reflect a complete misunderstanding of the standing and value of ASEAN to the international community."
For years, Mahbubani has been decrying the bizarre preoccupation with NATO and Europe, as if American thinking were still frozen in some intellectual glacier even as geopolitical warming is pushing China to the fore and sliding Europe to the side.
But those clever Southeast Asians haven't been derailed by the big American sleep. Though founded back in 1967, when the fear of communism was still a big deal, in 1997 ASEAN morphed into what they call ASEAN Plus Three to include Japan, China and South Korea (roughly speaking, the 2nd, 3rd and 12th largest economies of the world).
The big bopper in that group is China, of course, without in the slightest denigrating the importance of Japan. But Tokyo is mired with leadership instability at the top, while Beijing continues to play a strong, steady and sometimes healthily provocative hand at the top.
Take, for example, the recent call by the Chinese for a new international currency to obviate the need for the U.S. dollar to be so central.
Washington's reaction was instantly negative. No surprise there: Ten years ago, typical knee-jerk negativity from American attended Tokyo's timely suggestion to create an Asian monetary fund in the wake of the frightening Asian financial crisis.
It wasn't a bad idea, and it deserved a more thoughtful (and, frankly, a more respectful) response than abject dismissal.
China's new proposal also deserves serious consideration. The Obama administration could demonstrate to the world that it is not just listening but taking it all in by calling a high-level multi-national meeting to carefully consider the idea. That would be the least America could do.
Syndicated columnist Tom Plate, who did his international studies at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, sits on the China member committee of the Pacific Council on International Policy. He can be reached at platecolumn@gmail.com.