American Economic Relations with Asia

The USA and Asia have an enormous stake in each others' continuing prosperity. This outcome is linked to the preservation of the open international economic order, which in turn faces challenges at both the interstate diplomatic level and at the domestic political level. The global financial crisis is probably the worst since the Great Depression and the domestic politics makes it increasingly difficult to formulate a constructive trade policy. In the absence of adequate reform at the global level, the alternative could be further fragmentation into competing regional blocs. Asia holds the key, combining both dissatisfaction with existing global arrangements with the resources to reconstitute, at least at the regional level, an alternative set of institutions and practices. How Asia responds, acting to strengthen reformed global institutions or undermine them in favor of regional alternatives, will partly depend on the policies of the dominant global power, the USA.