NEW DELHI — U.S. President-elect Barack Obama takes office at a time when a fundamental and qualitative reordering of power is under way in the Asia-Pacific, with tectonic shifts challenging strategic stability. The impact of such shifts on U.S. foreign policy is bound to be accentuated by America's growing challenges, including a deep economic recession at home and the two separate wars being waged overseas.
Such challenges dictate greater U.S.-China cooperation to ensure continued large Chinese capital inflows, and Beijing's political support on contentious issues ranging from North Korea and Myanmar to Pakistan and Iran. Such calculations, in turn, are certain to have a bearing on America's dual role in Asia — "as a resident power and as the straddle power across the Asia-Pacific," to quote Robert Gates, who is to stay on as defense secretary in the Obama administration. According to Gates, the "next U.S. administration seems certain to continue the overlapping, long-standing security partnerships" in Asia but "will also inherit an agenda of worrying issues."
Asia has come a long way since the creation of two Koreas, two Chinas, two Vietnams and India's partition. It has risen dramatically as the world's main creditor and economic locomotive. The ongoing global power shifts indeed are primarily linked to Asia's phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. How fast Asia has come can be gauged from the 1968 book, "Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations," by Swedish economist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, who bemoaned the manner in which impoverishment, population pressures and resource constraints were weighing down Asia.