Healthy Signals From Asia

Thailand and many of its neighbors are starting to get their act together. After two years of bad luck and self-inflicted pain, here’s a really good sign: The awful, fiendish downtown traffic has returned as jobs and even the tourists are reappearing. Even Thailand’s government, for a decade little more than a revolving door Cabinet, seems relatively steady. The current foreign minister, Surin Pitsuwan, has been in office long enough to represent his country at two consecutive annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summits. That’s not so unusual for other countries, but for Thailand, it’s a milestone.

This upbeat mood is good to see. Ever since the frightening and demoralizing Asian recession, triggered when the Thai baht plunged, Southeast Asia has been vividly aware that everyone lives in the same neighborhood: Nothing so concentrates the regional mind as the prospect of a collective economic hanging. Now, none of the region’s economies appear to be getting worse, and a few look to be on a serious upswing. Even some political developments seem to be leaning Asia’s way.

Consider the surprise mid-term resignation of International Monetary Fund head Michel Camdessus after almost 13 years in the job. The IMF undoubtedly played a major positive role in the Asian recovery, especially in South Korea, but Camdessus also became a symbol of Western arrogance and economic hegemony. Now there’s increasing talk in the West of reforming or restructuring the IMF to improve the institutional safety net, so as to cushion devastating economic downdrafts that cause widespread social dislocation in emerging societies. That would be very much in Asia’s interest.

The region is also still applauding, without dissent, the hair-raising eleventh-hour deal cut by the Clinton and Jiang administrations aimed at bringing China into the World Trade Organization. Smooth U.S.-China relations provide the geopolitical stability for regional economic growth and social development.

This is why Asia also applauded--though perhaps not with a standing ovation--the first major foreign policy speech of Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush. Delivered last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, it was framed by the Southeast Asian news media as a call for steady U.S. internationalism in the face of roiling congressional provincialism, and stable Sino-American relations--though with a nod to the anti-China right in the U.S. Leading papers, such as Singapore’s Straits Times, emphasized such Bush statements as: “We predict no conflict [with China]. We intend no threat. . . . If I am president, China will find itself respected as a great power.”

Southeast Asia liked those words and, reflecting the region’s voracious wish for good relations between the two powers, downplayed others. So it in effect neutralized Bush’s comments depicting China as “an espionage threat to our country” and as a nation that’s “alarming abroad and appalling at home.”

Beijing didn’t like that, much less Bush’s support for a missile defense system for Taiwan--but, of course, Bush is working both sides of the street.

Bush had little to say about the world’s fourth most-populous nation, Indonesia. Yet few Americans do. Washington is so distant from Jakarta that scarcely anyone this side of Tokyo comprehends the devastating destabilizing effect were this nation of 3,000-plus islands, glued together mainly by an overbearing central government, to disintegrate as one East Timor after another leaves the national fold.

There is one positive sign, though: Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, recently elected successor to the fallen dictator Suharto, has had a good first month, popping up in capitals from Beijing to Washington to show the new Indonesian democratic flag. However, his nation, still reeling from the Asian financial crisis and plunging for the first time into democratic government, will require the material assistance and political support of others outside the region. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi stepped up and, dropping Japan’s usual caution, laid out the red carpet for Wahid earlier this month in Tokyo. In January, savvy Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong will arrive with aid and lots of advice. Earlier this month, even President Clinton met with Wahid in a session that went well.

Southeast Asians are hoping that Clinton, who just finished visiting Turkey, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria and Kosovo, will somehow find his way out here early next year. They note that those five countries together have a population of 144.1 million and Indonesia, smack in the geopolitical center of pivotal Southeast Asia, has more than 200 million. A U.S. presidential state visit would be easy to justify and enormously stabilizing to the entire region.