A de-Americanized world needed !

SHUTDOWN. A view of a hall on Capitol Hill September 29, 2013 in Washington, DC. AFP/Brendan Smialowski

As U.S. politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world.

Emerging from the bloodshed of the Second World War as the world's most powerful nation, the United States has since then been trying to build a global empire by imposing a postwar world order, fueling recovery in Europe, and encouraging regime-change in nations that it deems hardly Washington-friendly.

With its seemingly unrivaled economic and military might, the United States has declared that it has vital national interests to protect in nearly every corner of the globe, and been habituated to meddling in the business of other countries and regions far away from its shores.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has gone to all lengths to appear before the world as the one that claims the moral high ground, yet covertly doing things that are as audacious as torturing prisoners of war, slaying civilians in drone attacks, and spying on world leaders.

Under what is known as the Pax-Americana, we fail to see a world where the United States is helping to defuse violence and conflicts, reduce poor and displaced population, and bring about real, lasting peace.

Moreover, instead of honoring its duties as a responsible leading power, a self-serving Washington has abused its superpower status and introduced even more chaos into the world by shifting financial risks overseas, instigating regional tensions amid territorial disputes, and fighting unwarranted wars under the cover of outright lies.

As a result, the world is still crawling its way out of an economic disaster thanks to the voracious Wall Street elites, while bombings and killings have become virtually daily routines in Iraq years after Washington claimed it has liberated its people from tyrannical rule.

Most recently, the cyclical stagnation in Washington for a viable bipartisan solution over a federal budget and an approval for raising debt ceiling has again left many nations' tremendous dollar assets in jeopardy and the international community highly agonized.

Such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated, and a new world order should be put in place, according to which all nations, big or small, poor or rich, can have their key interests respected and protected on an equal footing.

To that end, several corner stones should be laid to underpin a de-Americanized world.

For starters, all nations need to hew to the basic principles of the international law, including respect for sovereignty, and keeping hands off domestic affairs of others.

Furthermore, the authority of the United Nations in handling global hotspot issues has to be recognized. That means no one has the right to wage any form of military action against others without a UN mandate.

Apart from that, the world's financial system also has to embrace some substantial reforms.

The developing and emerging market economies need to have more say in major international financial institutions including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, so that they could better reflect the transformations of the global economic and political landscape.

What may also be included as a key part of an effective reform is the introduction of a new international reserve currency that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar, so that the international community could permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States.

Of course, the purpose of promoting these changes is not to completely toss the United States aside, which is also impossible. Rather, it is to encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs.

And among all options, it is suggested that the beltway politicians first begin with ending the pernicious impasse.

- By Xinhua Commentary writer Liu Chang 2013-10-13

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Winds of change blowing in Asia

The APEC and TPPA summits in Bali recently showed the winds of change are blowing in the region, symbolised by the US President’s absence but also reflecting the aptness or otherwise of policies.

THE winds of change are blowing, bringing shifts in perceived wisdom and the old order, especially in the Asian region.

The recent APEC summit and associated meetings in Bali were marked not so much by results but by perceptions.

In fact, the lack of results, rather than results, was the main story. This lack was not so much in the APEC itself, but in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA).

The leaders of TPPA countries met in a separate venue away from the APEC summit. The Indonesians were the host of APEC and not the TPPA, which they are not involved in, and were unhappy that the TPPA threatened to take away the limelight from the main event.

But that was the secondary story. The main news was that United States President Barrack Obama had to give a miss not only to his scheduled visits to Malaysia and Indonesia, but to the APEC summit itself.

This was damaging to the United States, symbolically and in practical terms. Obama could not be blamed personally, as everyone knows the problems he faces at home with the onset of the “government shutdown” and the looming debt-ceiling crisis.

The problem was deeper. Obama’s absence confirmed the already growing perception in the region and the world that there is a dysfunctional governance system in the United States, at least for the moment, and it is becoming a long moment.

Sympathy outside the United States lies with the President, a sympathy tinged with pity for a legitimate leader confronted with the fringe (but a powerful fringe) of the opposition party that refuses to accept his healthcare reform bill that has come into law, and which is willing to damage the operations of the administration and apparently even the country’s financial creditworthiness to achieve its ideological objective.

Every democratic country has its moments of clashes between governing and opposition parties, and sometimes it can paralyse the country until the crisis is resolved, one way or other.

But here we are talking about the United States, the world’s most powerful country, and the greatest advocate of democracy. What happens in the United States has ramifications for the rest of the world.

Suddenly the unthinkable becomes a reality – the partial government shutdown – and a possibility: a default on loans, with disastrous effects on the world economy.

The crisis emerging from the present configuration of the division of powers between executive and legislative wings of government – a major pillar of Western democracy – calls into question how stable that system really is and what can be done if the paralysis lasts more than just a passing moment.

The lack of clear results in the TPPA leaders’ meeting in Bali is partly attributed to the absence of Obama, since the President had been assigned the role of galvanising the other leaders to meet the aim of concluding the talks by year-end.

In the end the leaders’ statement merely said the negotiations are on track, but did not mention they would finish by December. The growing perceptions is that the TPPA talks are facing turbulence.

Obama’s absence cannot really be blamed for that. Instead, the TPPA meetings of ministers and then political leaders only confirmed what has been known in recent months, that the TPPA agenda has been overloaded with too many issues and by too many demands, especially by the United States, that are too extreme for other countries to simply accept.

According to reports, most of the TPPA countries cannot agree to the US demands on intellectual property that go far beyond the WTO rules.

Several countries have problems with various other issues, including environment, investment and competition.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak was the most outspoken. At an APEC side event, he said the TPPA’s year-end timeline is not cast in stone and asked that more flexibilities be given to countries.

“We do have a few areas of great concern,” he said, adding: “As you go into areas of intellectual property , investor-state dispute settlement, government procurement, state-owned enterprises, environment and labour, you impinge on fundamentally the sovereign right of the country to make regulation and policy. That is a tricky part and that is why we ask for flexibility.”

These comments by the Prime Minister summarise succinctly the “agenda overload” problem in the TPPA negotiations.

The areas that are trumpeted by the United States as a set of 21st century issues that make the TPPA a trail-blazer may turn out not to be so first-class after all.

Instead, they make some politicians, officials and parliamentarians uncomfortable, and many public-interest NGOs and business representatives, very unhappy.

The APEC summit and the TPPA meetings in the sidelines gave the big perception that US leadership is in question if not in decline in the region and the big talk was the corresponding rise of China, whose President’s presence and performance was the reverse mirror image of Obama’s absence.

But it is not only the contrasts in relative presence and economic and political power that counts. In the end it is also the content of policies advocated and the willingness to be genuine partners, and not to make use of new pacts and treaties to benefit one’s own country or interests, at the expense of others.

Contributed by Global Trends Martin Khor
> The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.

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China's assertiveness, confidence and trust, long history together with Asean

China and South-East Asia have had a long history together, but they still need to work hard to consolidate confidence and trust.

Highlights: President Xi's Southeast Asia tour

RECENTLY, the Chinese Ambassador to Malaysia, Chai Xi, remarked that the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping will lift the bilateral ties of the two nations to a higher level.

Saying that the Sino-Malaysian relationship has taken the lead when compared to the other members of Asean, Chai pointed out that China has become Malaysia’s biggest trading partner in the world, with the first seven months of this year recording a 14.9% increase in bilateral trade to US$59.72bil (RM190.6bil).

Indeed, Xi’s visit to Malaysia was historic not only because it was his first state visit to the region since assuming office, but also in the sense that it marks another step in the continuation of the long history that Malaysia has shared with China.

It is a history that can be traced back to the 15th century, when the famous Chinese explorer Admiral Zeng He of the Ming Dynasty landed on the port city of Malacca only to find a thriving community of Chinese traders that had long established ties with the local population here.

Fast forward to the 20th century, into the height of the Cold War, and we have an international environment that is mired in suspicion and misperception, with loyalties mostly split along clear ideological lines. South-East Asia was a particular hotbed, and there was a great fear that China would turn its attention to the young and small nations of the region and begin forcibly exerting its influence to bring them under its sphere of control.

And yet, amid all the paranoia and balancing among all the nations in South-East Asia, Malaysia had the foresight of Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, who clearly understood the gravity and inevitability of China’s peaceful rise when he pushed for Kuala Lumpur to be the first in the region to establish diplomatic relations and normalise ties with Beijing in 1974.

Those who express opinions implying that it is possible to shape the direction of regional security and development without including China display a worrying lack of understanding and appreciation of the lessons of history, particularly that of the region.

That China will fulfil its cyclical destiny and rise to take centre stage in Asia and become a major player in world affairs is no longer a question, but the character and nature of the rise will ultimately depend on how others might want to meet this rise halfway.

Successive Chinese leaderships have assured the rest of the world that their rise is a peaceful one, which does not seek to create ripples and waves in the international world order, and there is plenty of evidence to support that assertion.

China is in pursuit of rapid economic growth and expansion to lift its 1.3 billion-strong population into the developed world. In order to do this, China needs wide-ranging support from the global community and a stable and peaceful international environment.

But China’s growing assertiveness, especially in the South China Sea, may unfortunately send the wrong signals to certain parties, and this is especially the case if there is very little understanding as to why China feels the need to proceed in such a manner.

The complexities and nuances that surround China’s actions are likely to be lost if the nervousness and concerns of its regional neighbours are not promptly and clearly addressed.

Asean countries have high hopes as to how far the Chinese dream can trailblaze the growth of the region and provide the developmental slipstream for them to follow suit.

However, the region is, understandably, still wary as it bears fresh scars of at least two other dreams before this: one that carried the salvation of “the white man’s burden” from the West, and another that sought to build a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” from the East (Japanese occupation).

Granted, the Chinese dream is categorically different from these expressions of imperialism cloaked in ideology, but one needs to understand the reasons why sovereignty is an overriding concern in the region and some react strongly to the movements of greater powers.

It should not be such a stretch for China, which bears the memory of the century of humiliation dealt by former European powers through their unequal treaties, to see that the concerns of its smaller regional neighbours run along similar lines.

China and South-East Asia have had a long history together, but they must also work hard at understanding each other better so that the confidence and trust that has been built over time, albeit interrupted by occasional incidents, can be strengthened, consolidated, and built upon extensively. Trust and understanding are not built overnight, but we are not mistaken to think that the process has been going on for quite some time now.

Networks of relationships have been stitched across the region for centuries, from the trading routes and migration patterns of yesteryear to the regional production networks and the financial and business networks of contemporary times. Part of the reason why South-East Asia has been developing rapidly has been attributed to the “bamboo networks”, the ethnic-based business networks built upon the hubs and spokes of the Chinese diaspora that intersperse the region, with firm roots in the local communities but sturdily connected to the regional landscape.

But while the “infrastructure” of trust has already been firmly built between China and South-East Asia in the form of these networks of ties, which some scholars refer to as the “invisible linkages” that hold us together, there needs to be a more concerted effort to bring about more interaction and discourse, which are the lifeblood of trust, to engage the various communities at multiple levels.

These connections and dealings must not only dwell exclusively on economic and security issues; although important and, some may even argue, central, there should also be some effort invested into exploring how the cultural and normative aspects of these relations can be worked upon and perhaps improved, presenting opportunities to further strengthen the trust and deepen the understanding between China and its smaller neighbours.

In this respect, the idea of moderation as espoused by Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak and reiterated by him in his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly, may lend itself as a starting point in the search for mutualities of interest. This framework of moderation calls for the exercise of restraint and the creation of a discursive environment that allows for a multiplicity of voices to come together and collectively work towards solutions, defusing tensions and avoiding conflict.

This notion is perhaps compatible to the Chinese Dream; as China aspires for peaceful development with Chinese characteristics towards a moderately prosperous society, Malaysia and the rest of South-East Asia pursue their own goal of development that holds fast to moderate principles, so that their race towards becoming fully developed nations does not sacrifice their identities, traditions and culture, and sovereignty, the very things that make them what they are.

The idea of building a truly authentic East Asian community can begin with this very simple but powerful idea, and as Malaysia looks forward to assuming the chairmanship of Asean in 2015, it also looks to further strengthen ties between China, itself and the region through the values and principle of moderation.

Contributed by  Tan Sri Razali Ismail
> Tan Sri Razali Ismail is Chairman of Global Movement of Moderates Foundation (GMM). The GMM is an initiative of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak that calls for combating the scourge of extremism in five broad areas – peaceful co-existence, democracy and rule of law, finance, education and conflict resolution. The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own

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