Asia power, Why Asia is so important for the United States has become a lot easier to understand because of the rise of China, the threat from North Korea, and US relationships with countries like Japan and Australia; however, you have to argue about why the United States difficult world in a world in which a lot of people want to turn inwards and focus on the homeland in a world in which there are constraints on US resources why the US need to remain even more engaged in Asia than before.
Asia power
Asia power, It’s not one argument about the United States planning a role in Asia develops that through instead playing a role in Asia and then expanding through the world of the indo-pacific and how it is changing some of those are historical chapters, well some of those are very contemporary and some in some ways do even seem much to do with geopolitics.
For example,e a chapter on the role of Indian women and why they cannot fully participate in politics and economics and like in India. It`s a drain on the strength of India which, of course, you all know the world`s largest so-called democracy and by now probably the world`s most populous nation.
Likewise, other chapters are more speculative about why Kim Jong-un cannot control his nuclear weapons. Not because he’s going to wake up one day and say he wants to nuke the Bay Area, but rather because controlling nuclear weapons and having a nuclear arsenal is a tough challenge for any state the United States, the soviet union, the old Soviet union Russia lots of accidents can occur when you have a nuclear arsenal, you have a very well-trained force of nuclear technicians and nuclear extraordinarily nuclear launch officers.
Asia`s New Geopolitics
We have no idea if North Korea will have any of that, so there`s a chapter that looks at why the greatest danger of North Korea having nuclear weapons is not that they`re going to decide to launch a nuclear war against the US but rather that they may not be able to control them safely and that an accident may instead wind up precipitating a larger war.
There`s also a chapter on Japan and why if you remember, back in the 1980s, the US thought Japan was going to control the world when the economic bubble asset and property bubble in Japan burst the 1980s. Why Japan seemed to lag so far behind the rest of the world in the succeeding 30 years of globalization?
When in fact what it was doing was making very distinct choices about how much it wanted to engage with the world instead of a Japanthata,t for some reason couldn`t modernize like the rest of the United States or China or the other countries that it had instead chosen specific barriers between itself in the world to protect things that it thought were more important for example a very unified homogeneous culture unified homogeneous populations a Japan didn`t necessarily want to open itself up to the wild west of unrestrained capital.
instead would accept certain economic inefficiencies to maintain a tighter income distribution across the population and create less underserved populations throughout the Japanese archipelago.
Asia power, So a Japan that consciously chose what the US would consider economic and indeed globalization and efficiencies but because of its prize and privileged social stability and overall social development across all of the sectors of Japan rather than having a country in which there were some mega winners and some mega losers which are more of a situation that describes.
Asia power, China today than does Japan meaning China is a country where we thought everyone all the boats were rising and everyone was benefiting but in fact, when you peel back the layers of what’s happening in China you see a country that is divided starkly by economic inefficiencies by winners and losers, starkly by political aims.
Asia power, The United States in Asia we should remember that even though the US was a country born of European colonies even though the US focused on the Atlantic for probably could even say the first 200-plus years of our existence as a nation, and at the same time, the US was always engaged with the Pacific world the first American ship to sail to Asia. It sailed by the way through the Atlantic, then into the Indian Ocean, and then up through what we consider southeast Asia today sailed from New York in 1784 just after the United States. It signed a peace treaty guaranteeing US independence.
Having any interchange with the nations of the Indo-Pacific that it wanted to so, it may be a phrase that the US has just adopted in the past few years, maybe the past decade or so. Still, the policy is the same policy the US followed for 150 years and more you know, if you look at it 180 years it was the genesis of the open door notes in 1900. It was the genesis of US engagement in the Pacific War during World War II and US commitments to treaty allies.
Asia’s new geopolitics about the role of America through history and today helps to ensure stability, helping to provide an open network of free trading nations, likewise promoting and supporting those countries that have adopted the very messy road of democracy it wasn’t so long ago about 35 years or that you could look back in Asia power that was much less democratic than it is today in which there were not democratic regimes in south Korea or Taiwan or Mongolia or Thailand or Indonesia.
Asia power, All of this was occurring at the same time, of course, that China was beginning its great rise, and while America’s attention became focused increasingly on China because of its economic hef,t political influence, and military might at the same time US was able to work with a much greater variety of democratic partners and begin to interact with them in increasingly democratically oriented organizations such as the association of southeast Asian nations not which every nation of that is a democracy but in which the idea of sovereignty and equality and democratically agreed to principles marks the association of the Southeast Asian nations.
