Charm offensive: Asia for Asians

A VOID was created when the Americans left the East Asian region and decided to focus on the Middle East post 9-11. The biggest continent was left to such country able to fill the void. But Japan was busy with its economy and so was India, South Korea was transitioning towards a more vibrant democracy and so, China became ambidextrous in its shift from hard to soft power using economy, culture and history, and multilateral organizations as it becomes more central to Asia.

The pivot to Asia is one of Obama’s central foreign policy initiatives. Simply put, the pivot is meant to be a strategic “re-balancing” of US interests from Europe and the Middle East toward East Asia. The pivot was a signal that the “Bush-era obsessions with the Middle East, democratization, and terrorism were over. The September 11th attacks and the subsequent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan diverted Washington’s attention from an East Asia that had become, in the words of the US Council on Foreign Relations, an “economic center of gravity.”