THE PACIFIC SUMMIT : Can America Become an Asian Nation?

When President Clinton sits down this weekend with the leaders of the nations from around the Pacific Rim, the session will mark not just a historic event for the region but also the embodiment of American hopes to become, and to be perceived as, an Asian nation in the 21st Century.

Never before have so many Asian heads of state and government gathered together in the same place at once. More than a dozen Asian nations or economies will be present Saturday for Clinton’s summit-level gathering of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) on Blake Island Marine State Park near Seattle.

For Asian nations, the session could be a crucial step toward formation of a truly region-wide organization--something the continent has lacked through centuries of isolation, colonialism, revolution, war and Cold War.

In economic terms, the leaders will represent more than 50% of the world’s gross national product.

Politically, there is no other forum in which the powerhouses of the United States, Japan and China all participate, and none other in which the three Chinese jurisdictions of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan are all members.

The meeting “really reflects the dawn of a new era for Asia in two respects,” said Michel Oksenberg, president of the East-West Center in Honolulu.

“For the first time, none of the great powers in the region find themselves in more of an adversarial than a cooperative relationship. . . . And second is the fact that a generational succession is occurring among leaders in Asia as well as the United States and Canada.

“Many of the first generation of Asian leaders, who came to power after World War II, were founders of their regimes,” Oksenberg noted. “The second generation, coming to power in the 1960s and 1970s, had close relations with the military and sought to derive their legitimacy from rapid economic growth.

“Now, the third generation is made up of politicians whose legitimacy is at least partly derived from the consent of the governed. There are exceptions to the trend, such as China, of course. But this Seattle meeting is the beginning of the building of networks of personal ties among this new generation of Asian leaders.”

Economic Clout

For the United States, the APEC summit in Seattle represents the most important, tangible step toward recognition of the fact that, at least in economic and commercial terms, Asia is fast overtaking Europe as the most important region in the world.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher observed recently that U.S. foreign policy has for too long had a Eurocentric bias, suggesting that the Clinton Administration intends to change things.

“Asia is where the (economic) growth is, Asia is where the people are, Asia is where the disposable income is,” one White House official noted recently.

Clinton first proposed the idea of a summit-level meeting of APEC leaders during his trip to Tokyo last July.

American policy-makers view the fledgling organization as the linchpin of the U.S. drive to guarantee that Asia, the world’s fastest-growing region, develops economic links that extend across the Pacific rather than merely within Asia itself.

“That’s why this group (APEC) is so important, because it spans the Pacific,” said Winston Lord, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, in a recent interview.

Another senior U.S. official put it even more bluntly, portraying the development of economic ties with Asia as an important element in the Clinton Administration’s drive to rejuvenate the American domestic economy.

“I don’t think there is any doubt where our economic interests lie,” this Administration official said. “We are a two-ocean country, but we have more trade going to Asia than we do to Europe. We are an Asian power, a Pacific power, and we need to stay that way.

“One of the strongest sectors of our own economy has been exports. And better relations, better market access, better integration of the Asia-Pacific region are a key priority for sustaining domestic growth.”

Asian Dynamics

Across the Pacific, the dynamics are the same in reverse. Quite a few Asian officials and scholars see the Seattle meeting, and APEC generally, as a vehicle for making sure the United States keeps its markets open and stays involved in Asia.

“In the past, during the Cold War era, we all took the United States for granted,” Keng Yong Ong, deputy chief of mission for Singapore’s embassy in Washington, observed recently. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union and your own economic problems in America, there has been deep concern that the United States will retreat within its own borders.

“APEC is useful mostly for focusing America’s attention on Asia,” Ong said. “Of course, that attention may be focused mostly on China and Japan, but as we say in Singapore, crumbs fall from the bread.”

What Southeast Asians want most of all, added a European diplomat based in the region, is “a U.S. commitment to stay in Asia, to balance their fears of Japan and of China.”

What is APEC? At the moment, it is a hodgepodge of 15 different nations or economies. (The term “economy,” rather than nation, is used for Hong Kong, a British colony that will become an autonomous subdivision of China in 1997, and for Taiwan, which the Beijing government considers to be part of Chinese territory.)

It is easiest to think of APEC’s membership as falling into four separate groupings.

First, there are the six nations of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Brunei).

Second, there are the two Northeast Asian powers, Japan and South Korea.

Third are the three Chinese political entities.

And finally come the four Anglo-Saxon nations across the waters from East Asia (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand)--all of them, to various degrees, desperate to avoid being excluded from the Asian economic boom.

Things may get even more complicated soon.

Mexico will probably be admitted to APEC during the Seattle meeting. And so powerful is the tug of the world’s most dynamic region that other nations in South Asia, Latin America and the South Pacific are moving to join--from Chile and Papua New Guinea to India and Pakistan.

Given the rush to join APEC, it is easy to forget that the organization had trouble getting off the ground at all.

The idea for such a group was first proposed in 1989 by Australia’s then-Prime Minister Bob Hawke, primarily as a way of ensuring that Australia was not shut out of Asia.

Hawke did not even include the United States on the initial invitation list. And the George Bush Administration was at first less than enthusiastic about the idea.

Cold War Strategy

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. policy in Asia had been to avoid regionwide organizations, on grounds that they might detract from America’s bilateral relationships with Japan, South Korea and smaller nations such as the Philippines and Thailand.

But Australia quickly turned around and invited the United States to be a founding member of APEC. And the American attitude toward APEC changed from lukewarm to downright enthusiastic--particularly after Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed began pressing for what would have amounted to an intra-Asian economic grouping that would have included Japan and other Asian nations but not the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The idea for an Asia-only, yen-dominated trade or economic bloc is still alive.

Last month, Southeast Asian economic ministers agreed to try next year to form such a group, called the East Asian Economic Caucus, as a separate organization within APEC.

The organizers plan to invite Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong to join--but not the four nations from across the oceans with Anglo-Saxon traditions and majority-white populations.

“You can’t say that the U.S. and Canada, nor Australia and New Zealand, are in East Asia,” an Indonesian official told the Japanese paper Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

Some experts believe that the danger of an exclusively Asian trade bloc is real and that American policy-makers should take it seriously.

“The significant thing is the extent to which this idea has progressed and that the Japanese have accepted it,” UC San Diego professor Chalmers Johnson said. “What’s actually going on is that a large number of people in East Asia think that the United States is a spent force, and they are adjusting their relations accordingly.”

But the contrary view is that the proposal for an all-Asian bloc is a hedge and a threat, intended to goad the United States into staying involved in Asia and, most important, to keep American markets open.

Under this point of view, Asian governments would form a strong bloc only if America turned toward protectionism and retreated from Asia.

The idea of an intra-Asian bloc “may be 25 years down the road, but for now it is a joke,” a Western diplomat in Asia said. “For now, what these countries want is to keep the access they have now to the American market.”

And that is the primary logic behind APEC, which is designed to preserve and strengthen both America’s entree to Asia and Asia’s entree to the United States.

Common Ground

Yet what do all the APEC nations have in common? Or, more to the point, what can such a crew of officials do once they manage to get together?

One Clinton Administration official admitted that for now, the organizers are worried even about basic problems such as translators at the Seattle meeting.

“We have to convince the world that APEC is not just another dog show,” Ong acknowledged.

There will be considerable efforts this week to show that an economic organization spanning Asia and the Pacific can produce concrete, practical results.

In Seattle, APEC is likely to generate some agreements on customs service, telecommunications and possibly an investment code or framework for the Asia-Pacific region.

But Clinton Administration officials acknowledge that there is reluctance among many Asian governments to have the transpacific organization do too much too soon.

“APEC is a baby,” Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Nancy Adams told the Asia Society here recently. “We are just moving from an identification-building stage to a stage where we have to produce results.”

The United States is now among the nations pushing to develop APEC into a strong organization.

Ironically, however, its efforts to achieve this goal are to a certain extent undercut by one of America’s past successes in Asia: the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the organization formed with U.S. support in the Vietnam War era to defend Southeast Asian democracies.

“Their main concern (about a strong transpacific organization) is to make sure ASEAN maintains its own identity and isn’t swallowed up,” Lord said.

Consensus Approach

Furthermore, these Southeast Asian countries have always operated by consensus, making strong action impossible if any government disagrees--a style of business that works more easily with six small, similar nations than 15 large and diverse ones.

For now, no matter what it actually does, the existence of APEC is useful in different ways to the United States and to Asian governments.

American officials believe that the specter of a strong transpacific trade group helps in bringing pressure on European governments, such as France, to open their markets and make the concessions necessary to complete the Uruguay Round of world trade talks.

“If the Europeans get a little nervous about APEC, that’s not such a bad thing,” said Robert Zoellick, who was undersecretary of state for economic affairs in the Bush Administration and took part in many of the early sessions of the transpacific organization.

An official in Clinton’s White House said bluntly that if the Uruguay Round of world trade talks fails, then APEC will take on added importance as the vehicle for a liberalized trade regime linking the United States and Asia.

Conversely, for Asian governments, the existence of APEC is useful in making sure the United States does not become too preoccupied with developing economic ties in the Western Hemisphere.

Some Asian officials and business leaders worry that if the North American Free Trade Agreement is passed, then Mexico (and perhaps later other Latin American countries) will replace Asia as the source of the electronics and semi-processed goods Americans now import from across the Pacific.

The geo-economic map of the globe is now in flux. Ultimately, the strength of APEC, and of America’s future economic links to Asia, will depend in part on developments elsewhere.

If the world trade talks fail and Europe becomes increasingly protectionist while the United States holds its markets open and Asian governments open theirs to American exports, then APEC could become a strong trade and economic grouping--and, even further, one of the most important organizations in the world.

Just Talk?

On the other hand, if Asian governments refuse to lift trade barriers to American products, and if NAFTA is passed and turns into a strong trade bloc diverting American trade and investment away from Asia, then the talk of economic ties spanning the Pacific will remain just talk.

In that case, APEC will not amount to much, and this week’s gathering will be remembered mostly as an idea that didn’t work.

“We’ll know in about five years whether this (APEC) is just a gabfest,” one Clinton Administration official said.

Times staff writer Mark Bousian contributed to this article.

COMPARING EAST AND WEST

* Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 1992

APEC: $5,418.1 billion

OECD: $7,825.92 billion

* Average Growth Rate

APEC: 4.8%

OECD: 1.1%

* Per Capita GDP

APEC: $3,094

OECD: $17,920

* Exports, 1992

APEC: $923.5 billion

OECD: $1,478.8 billion

* Export Change vs. 1984

APEC: +242%

OECD: +212%

* APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) figures include 13 of 15 member countries--Australia, Brunei, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Figures for Canada and United States have been removed for these comparisons.

* OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) figures include 19 of OECD’s 24 member countries--Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey. Figures for Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and United States have been removed for these comparisons.

Source: International Business Communications/USA