Asia and America at the Crossroads

Asia is entering an era of its own—youthful, urban, and dynamic. The dangers of chaos or collapse seem over, largely because of the instinct for survival of Asian nationalism, as well as of the American people's support of Asia during the past thirty years. The new Asian era will bring a resumption of Asian prerogatives, a renaissance of Asian styles, and a return to the basic Asian realities of synthesis, solidity, pragmatism, and plural diplomacy. No one nation—Asian or alien—will be able to dictate Asia's destiny or the key question of Asia's future organization. Asian primacy will, indeed, replace foreign predominance. A search for accommodation and convergence beyond containment, in new forms of regional co-operation, is becoming Asia's main thrust in the 1970's. For this, we need new policies. We should reduce our increasingly obsolete and much too visible overpresence in Asia. Instead, we should develop a new kind of relevant and modest partnership suitable to the Asian framework of this new Asian era. Our immediate need is to put our relationships with, among others, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines on a better basis, and to prepare ourselves to be ready to deal, eventually, with a new leadership on Mainland China. In the future, our style and our model may be more relevant to the Asians than our vast power and resources. The most extraordinary feature of this crossroads is that some aspects of Asian modernization are becoming more like ours while, paradoxically, we are becoming more unlike Asia and the rest of the world in other respects.