The 14th Informal APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting concluded on Nov. 19, 2006, and the participants had their photo taken in colorful Vietnamese traditional costumes called ao dai. Still in the shadow of the congressional election failure, President George W. Bush, realizing that a stable Asia is very important for the U.S. geostrategy, took advantage of the occasion to enhance the prestige of the United States. Just as American experts said, the Bush administration has probably become a lame duck now, but even a healthy duck needs to find a quiet pond.

"APEC's uniquely trans-Pacific character is an important political reason for U.S. to strengthen the group," Donald Emmerson, director of the Southeast Asia Forum of Shorenstein APARC at Stanford University, explained. "While APEC has lagged, East Asian regionalism has boomed. That has been good for East Asia. But U.S. and East Asian interests alike could be hurt if the Pacific Ocean ends up being split between rival Chinese and American spheres of influence."

However, the U.S. effort to save the Doha Round of trade talks with the Asia-Pacific Free Trade Agreement has yielded little. The Doha Round aimed to remove trade barriers in the world but was suspended due to some countries' agriculture protection policies. Washington had wanted to model the Doha Round upon the Asia-Pacific Free Trade Agreement. But U.S. officials never expected that there would be so many differences among the Asia-Pacific leaders, and that the economic development of Pacific Rim countries differ in thousands of ways. Despite the fact that the Hanoi Statement reiterated that supporting the Doha Round was APEC's priority, no material progress has been made.

"The U.S. is urging a last ditch effort to restart the talks through APEC," Professor Charles Morrison, president of the East-West Center located in Hawaii, says. "Whether or not APEC can do more than make a rhetorical statement of support is unsure. I feel that the APEC economies should agree to prepare new offers within a short period of time -- three weeks, for example -- to challenge the Europeans, Brazilians, Indians and others."

United States Steps Out to "Please" ASEAN

Seventeen years after its establishment, APEC now plays a decisive role in the international political arena. It has 40 percent of the world's population, 48 percent of the world trade volume and 56 percent of the world GDP. Since 1989, the economy in this region has grown by 26 percent, compared to only 8 percent economic growth rate in the rest of the world. With the double advantage of economic strength and rapid growth, China, being one of APEC's main economies and its "engine," has fully taken the limelight. On the other hand, the United States has been weighed down with countering terrorism in the Middle East.

"China has done very well in enhancing its relations with Southeast Asia in recent years," Sheldon Simon, professor of the Program in Southeast Asian Studies at Arizona State University, points out. "China has not only established a free trade forum for China and ASEAN countries, but also helped and influenced the area with its economy and culture. But I think that the United States has realized the importance of this area and come back to fasten its friendly relationship with the region."

The United States coming back to Southeast Asia and repairing its relations with the ASEAN countries is partly activated by China's increasing influence in the area.

"The naissance and growth of some democratic countries in Southeast Asia has received sympathetic response of democratic values from Washington," said Simon. "With the traditional friendly relations between the area and the United States, these countries value their friendship with the United States sometimes more than the trust in their neighboring countries. Geopolitics is also very important factor. The Asia-Pacific area is a very important to the world economy and the U.S. power structure. Therefore, the United States will not easily give it up."

Another motive for the United States to foster closer relations in the area is the common interest of countering terrorism. There are still some terrorist groups in Indonesia, the Philippines and southern Thailand.

"President Bush has a perfect attendance record at APEC meetings (Clinton missed two of them), which says that he does take APEC seriously and believes Asia is important to U.S. interests," Ralph Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview with the Washington Observer Weekly.

Besides attending the APEC summit meetings annually, Washington has recently activated several plans to "please" the ASEAN countries, including setting up a ministerial dialogue system with them and a platform for maintaining contact at the deputy finance minister level, even increased exchanges at the deputy defense secretary level.

The extent of U.S. efforts to foster cordial relations with Southeast Asian countries can also be seen in the increasingly friendly U.S.-Vietnamese economic and trade relations. The Bush administration is not only supporting Vietnam to enter the WTO, but has even proposed giving Vietnam Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status.

"The reason that Bush failed to bring the gift of PNTR status to the APEC Hanoi summit is that the Congress dominated by the Republicans was lacking efficiency and could not pass the proposal in time," Simon explained. "But I think that it will be passed as soon as possible in the next month or by the Democrats who begin to dominate the Congress from next January."

Simon and Cossa both admit that Burma is an unharmonious element in U.S. relations with ASEAN. The Burmese dictatorial military government is really the most typical negative example of democracy for the United States. But ASEAN countries are reluctant to see Burma "punished" by the United States for ideological reasons. So Burma has become a sensitive issue in U.S.-ASEAN relations.

"This is a good way for him to interact with ASEAN since Myanmar is not there and this issue does not have to be addressed," said Cossa.

Simon, an expert of Southeast Asia affairs, points out ASEAN countries should be happy about the advantage they have with China and the United States vying for their attention. Being able to juggle the two big powers, Southeast Asia has gained many practical interests and financial aid for its economy, trade, security, culture and education.

"In a short period, there will not be any serious interest conflicts in the triangle balance of China, the United States and ASEAN," Simon told the Washington Observer Weekly. "ASEAN countries' only worry, if there is any, is an accidental spark in the U.S.-China military interaction in Southeast Asia such as the confrontation across the Taiwan Straits."

Turning the Asia-Pacific into a "Gigantic Enterprise?"

"The United States wants to demonstrate its continuing interest in the Asia-Pacific region. It is urging for a study of an Asia Pacific free trade area and support for an APEC business card, and both shifts of approach, illustrate its interest in and support for the APEC process," said Morrison.

An important subject for the APEC Hanoi summit is the "active discussion" of establishing an APEC free trade region. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton proposed for the first time in 1993 the setting up of such an economic zone. Before Bush's visit, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Karan Bhatia suggested that establishing an APEC free trade zone would be a subject worth serious discussion. But his proposal did not receive a warm response from the host. The Vietnamese Deputy Foreign Minister Le Cong Phung stressed that establishing a free trade zone is a long-term objective and will not affect progress of negotiations with the WTO or other bilateral trade agreements.

"Regarding the study of the Asia Pacific free trade area, a number of economies were skeptical because it would be such a large undertaking," said Morrison. A similar plan was once axed in an APEC ministerial statement and the leaders attending this summit do not seem to have much interest in it.

Simon explained Bush's thinking on the subject: "Washington reiterated its intention to establish an Asia-Pacific free trade zone in order to save the precarious WTO Doha Round. Breaking the tariff barriers in the Asia-Pacific region will help continue to press relevant countries to concede in granting agricultural tax subsidies and hopefully open the door to the Doha Round."

The five-year Doha Round was suspended in July this year because six major WTO members -- the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil and India -- failed to reach agreement on market access for agricultural and non-agricultural products. Given the situation, the organizer said that the informal APEC economic leaders' meeting would provide a "good opportunity" to help restore the Doha Round talks. However, the Hanoi summit joint declaration just vaguely indicated that APEC will pursue further integration on issues such as energy in 2007. It would be extremely optimistic to expect that APEC will be able to remove all the tariff barriers in the region before 2010. Although the area produces 50 percent of the world's economic value, the styles and stages of economic development, the cultural backgrounds and political systems of the countries in the region vary a great deal, making it very difficult for these Asian countries to eliminate all these discrepancies and become fully integrated.

"Out of different worries, many Southeast Asian countries are actually not interested in the proposal though they do not speak out. Or we may say that it's not time yet now to change the Asia-Pacific region into a gigantic enterprise," Simon told Washington Observer Weekly.

Quite apart from who concedes what in return for what concession over the APEC free trade mechanism, the question arises: What geographical scope should a regional trade arrangement have? Who should be a party to the agreement and who should not?

There would appear to be three different ideas on the table: (a) the APEC-wide free trade area that the United States proposed at the recent summit in Hanoi; (b) the East Asia Summit-wide framework that Japan reportedly favors, which would include ASEAN + 6 (China, Japan, South Korea, India, New Zealand, Australia) but not the United States; and (c) the ASEAN Plus Three (China, Japan, South Korea) context that China seems to prefer, in which the exact positions of Tokyo and Beijing are not entirely clear.

"Without discussing the merits or demerits of each of these arrangements, suffice it to note that since ASEAN is common to all of them, the net effect of these alternative ideas is to strengthen the negotiating position of ASEAN," said Emmerson. "Then again, ASEAN will not necessarily be unified as to its preference for the three proposals. It will be interesting to look for the positions to be taken by individual ASEAN countries and for their collective effort to arrive at a single negotiating position, e.g., in the run-up to the ASEAN summit and the second the East Asia Summit in the Philippines next month."

Cossa has hope for 2007. "The U.S. in particular would like to see APEC moving faster, and will look ahead to next year, with Australia in the chair, for some real progress."

American Public Doesn't Share Washington's Interest in Southeast Asia

The prospect of economic and strategic cooperation brought about by APEC made for a lively week in Southeast Asia. But it stirred little response in the United States. According to the interviewed experts of Southeast affairs, the American public is still haunted by the situation in Iraq and the mid-term election. Even the U.S. media framed the event as Bush's first visit to a foreign country since the Republicans were defeated in the mid-term election.

"Because of the Congressional election, President Bush will want to show leadership rather than simply respond to the new Congress. Both Doha and the nuclear proliferation issue are examples," said Morrison.

Cossa holds a different view: "I don't think the elections will have any major impact on what Bush does or how he does it during this trip. Iraq is his legacy. What he does in Asia can make things better or worse at the margins but will likely be overshadowed by Iraq."

Simon echoed the sentiment. "On one hand, the Republican Party's defeat in the election cannot directly influence Bush's trip to Asia. On the other hand, Bush's economic achievements in the Southeast region will not add to his political record. In Asia, only the North Korea issue may sway the public opinion in the United States."

Yan Li, Washington Observer weekly - Issue No. 201, November 22, 2006

Reprinted by Permission February 12, 2007.

Anyone who has followed the US presidential race knows that Senator Barack Obama, if he runs and wins, will be the first African-American to live in the White House. Fewer know that, if that happens, he will also become the first US president to have lived in Indonesia as a child and to have had an Indonesian stepfather.

Until now, this bit of biography might have mattered only to fans of political trivia. But elements of the conservative press have made an issue of Obama's links to Indonesia by insinuating that during his time there he might have absorbed radical Islamist ideas at a Muslim school. "Hillary's Team Has Questions about Obama's Muslim Background" ran the headline in Insight Magazine that started the flap. The editor may have wished to kill two birds - the presidential hopes of both Obama and his main rival for the Democratic nomination - with a single stone. Readers who believed the report would have thought twice before supporting Obama, while those who considered it false would have thought less of Hillary for stooping to plant it.

Official spokespeople for Obama and Clinton, respectively, quickly denied the allegation as "completely false" and "an obvious right-wing hit job." But not before the charge had been repeated by Fox News and debated in the blogosphere.

Barack Obama's parents met at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He was born in 1961. Two years later his parents divorced. His mother remarried. His new stepfather was Indonesian. In 1967, when Barack was six years old, the family moved to Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. There, as described in his 1995 biography, Barack attended a private Catholic school and, later, a "predominantly Muslim" one. In 1971, when he was ten, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to continue his schooling.

Investigative reporting by CNN, the Associated Press, and other responsible media has established that the notion that Obama was influenced by a radical Islamist agenda is absurd. He was never enrolled in a madrasah. Nor is it surprising that students at the secular public school he did attend were "predominantly Muslim" - nearly nine-tenths of all Indonesians are. The atmosphere in Jakarta in 1967-69 was basically secular. Muslim head scarves, for example, were rare. I know because I lived there then.

Obama was sent to a Catholic and then to a secular public school. His parents, of modest means, could not afford tuition at the international school. At the public school, which welcomed pupils of various faiths, Obama's parents registered him as "Muslim" only for convenience. The Indonesian Communist Party had just been destroyed, and atheistic Marxism outlawed. Pupils were required to state an affiliation with a major world religion. When enrolling a child, the common practice was to list the father's faith.

Obama's stepfather, Soetoro, was only nominally Muslim. Like many if not most other ethnic-Javanese Indonesians at that time, he was a "statistical Muslim." That label was applied to those who, if required by a school registrar or a census taker to state their religion, would say "Islam," but who were Muslims far more from habit or heritage than by practice or conviction.

Should we be glad that this smear has been so quickly put to rest, and move on? Yes. But not before noting - and regretting - an irony: Precisely when tides of disregard for the United States and its policies are sweeping the world, when Americans more than ever before need to understand Muslim societies, American fears of Islam are being evoked and stoked.

Far from being seen as a detriment to his presidential candidacy, Barack Obama's prior exposure to a foreign culture should be counted as an asset.

At the same tender age as Obama's when he was in Jakarta, I was in Moscow attending a Soviet elementary school. I remember my teacher frowning at me when, on the anniversary of Lenin's death, unlike my Russian classmates, I couldn't manage to cry. My parents, my sister, and I could have lived in the building that housed the American Embassy - a "golden ghetto." But my father wanted us to learn the Russian language and experience Russian life. I am grateful that he did.

The idea that Americans, children or adults, should wrap themselves in familiar cocoons and avoid encounters with anything strange, including Indonesian Islam, is worse than just bad parenting. It is a willful parochialism that the United States as a country cannot afford. Not in this post-9/11 world. Not if we wish to engage with that world as it actually is - rather than as we might, in fearful isolation, imagine it to be.

This opinion piece was printed in the San Jose Mercury News on February 1, 2007 under the title "Obama's international background an asset, not a flaw." To read the version that was printed in the Mercury News please click on the link below. It was also printed in Yale Global Online. There is a link below to that version.

A proposal to assess the societal and security implications of the female deficit in China, a study of the impact of higher education's rapid expansion in large developing economies, and incentives for provision of health care services for one billion people in rural China were among the new projects funded by Stanford's Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies (PFIIS) in mid-February. Planning grants for an international health and society initiative in the Indian subcontinent and psychosocial treatment for children orphaned by the tsunami in Indonesia were also awarded.

"These projects show great potential to advance human knowledge, help devise sustainable solutions, and build a better, more secure future for millions around the world," said Stanford President John Hennessy. "In launching The Stanford Challenge, we committed to marshal university resources to address some of the 21st century's great challenges in human health, international peace and security, and the environment."

The $3 million, intellectual venture capital fund was established by the Office of the President and the Stanford International Initiative in 2005 to encourage new cross-campus, interdisciplinary research and teaching among all seven schools at Stanford on three overarching global challenges: pursuing peace and security, improving governance, and advancing human well-being. The first $1 million was awarded in February 2006 to eight interdisciplinary faculty teams examining such issues as the HIV/AIDS treatment revolution in sub-Saharan Africa, why Latin America has been left behind in recent gains by developing countries, and food security and the environment.

"It's impressive to see the committed, collaborative, and innovative ways Stanford faculty are joining together in new interdisciplinary research and teaching to generate new understanding of the linkages among complex problems and train a new generation of leaders to address them effectively," said Freeman Spogli Institute Director Coit D. Blacker, chair of the International Initiative Executive Committee.

New projects qualifying for funding and their principal investigators are:

• Female Deficit and Social Stability in China: Implications for International Security. Melissa Brown, anthropological sciences; Marcus Feldman, biological sciences, and Matthew Sommer, history. As the number of surplus, marriage-age men in China approaches 47 million in 2050, this project will study factors that predict men's inability to marry before 30, the availability of social welfare to men and their families, their contribution to the floating population of rural-to- urban migrants, the labor-related migration of unmarried women, and the impact of this migration for domestic stability and international security.
• Potential Economic and Social Impacts of Rapid Higher Education Expansion in the World's Largest Developing Economies. Martin Carnoy, education; Amos Nur, geophysics; and Krishna Saraswat, electrical engineering. The development of higher education systems in Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) will have a major impact on their ability to transition to large, developed, knowledge-based economies. Is the way nation states expand and reform higher education in response to global pressures an important indicator of societal capacity to achieve sustained economic growth? This project will examine differing approaches of BRIC governments to higher-education growth and reform, and ask whether these reflect differing levels of state capacity to expand the knowledge base for economic and social development and whether differing approaches result in significant changes in formation of analytical skills in university graduates, particularly scientists and engineers.
• Health Care for One Billion: Experimenting with Incentives for the Supply of Health Care in Rural China. Scott Atlas, radiology; Scott Rozelle, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, FSI. This project examines the effects of existing health policies and institutions in rural areas of China - including rural health insurance, privatization of rural clinics, and investment in township hospitals - and introduces a new experiment to study and realign incentives to address a serious flaw in China's health care system, the practice in which doctors both prescribe and derive significant profits from drugs.

Two planning grants were also awarded, as follows:

• Stanford International Health and Society Initiative: Proposal to Plan for an Initial Program in the Indian Subcontinent. Vinod K. Bhutani, pediatrics; Nihar Nayak, obstetrics and gynecology. This project seeks to improve unacceptably high maternal and childhood morbidity and mortality rates in the Indian subcontinent by devising innovative strategies to bridge existing social and access barriers in the micro- and macro- health environment. Includes leadership training and cooperative work on practice and policy strategies with experts from Stanford and the subcontinent.
• Psychosocial Treatment of Children Orphaned by the Asian Tsunami in Indonesia. Hugh Solvason, psychiatry; Donald Barr, sociology. This project's goal is to develop and implement changes to reduce the sense of dislocation, anxiety, and behavioral problems among tsunami orphans at the As-Syafi`iyah Orphanage in Jakarta. By arranging the children into more cohesive groups that can operate like "families" rather than their current state of random associations typically found in orphanages, the project will create a new and ordered social system. In addition, Solvason and Barr plan to develop a system of counseling interventions for the most severely symptomatic children (supervised by Stanford Psychiatry faculty). Translated measures of depression, anxiety, and PTSD will be used to assess the success of the intervention.

The projects will produce new field research, conferences, research papers, books, symposia, and courses for Stanford students.

A third round of project awards will be made in February 2008. A formal request for proposals will be issued in the fall of 2007, with proposals due by December 14, 2007. Priority is given to teams of faculty who do not typically work together, represent multiple disciplines, and address issues that fall broadly within the three primary research areas of the International Initiative. Projects are to be based on collaborative research and teaching involving faculty from two or more disciplines, and where possible, from two or more of Stanford's seven schools.

For additional information, contact Catharine Kristian, ckristian@stanford.edu.