J. Bryan Hehir, a Catholic priest and leading thinker on ethics and foreign policy, will deliver the annual Drell Lecture on Tuesday, Dec. 6, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in the Oak Lounge at Tresidder Union. Sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the talk is titled "The Politics and Ethics of Nonproliferation." The event is free and open to the public.

Hehir, the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard University and the secretary for social services and president of Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Boston, has provided ethical insight on political issues throughout a career of religious and academic leadership.

"Father Hehir has been a leading voice promoting clarity and consistency in our thinking about the complex ethical dilemmas created by nuclear weapons in the modern world," said CISAC Director Scott Sagan. "I am thrilled that he has accepted CISAC's invitation to present this year's Drell Lecture."

Perhaps the best-known example of Hehir's influence in bringing ethical considerations to bear on strategic foreign policy concerns is the 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). As secretary of the USCCB's Department of Social Development and World Peace, Hehir led the bishops in writing the letter, titled "The Challenge of Peace--God's Promise and Our Response." Amid the escalating U.S.-U.S.S.R. arms race, this pastoral letter went beyond the tradition of giving guidance on such issues as war and military service to make an unprecedented statement on nuclear weapons policies.

Criticizing the arms race as "a folly which does not provide the security it promises," the U.S. bishops called for a "moral about-face" and urged "immediate, bilateral, verifiable agreements to halt the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons systems." The bishops urged the world to "summon the moral courage and technical means to say no to nuclear conflict; no to weapons of mass destruction; no to an arms race which robs the poor and the vulnerable; and no to the moral danger of a nuclear age which places before humankind indefensible choices of constant terror or surrender."

Hehir continues to address ethical and political aspects of war and nuclear weapons. In his talk at Stanford he will probe the changed context of proliferation, as he discusses ethical and strategic challenges inherited from the past and now reshaped in this century. His writings include The Moral Measurement of War: A Tradition of Continuity and Change; Military Intervention and National Sovereignty; and Just War Ethic Revisited.

Physicist Sidney Drell, CISAC's founding co-director and namesake of the Drell Lecture, described Hehir as "one of the most thoughtful and articulate analysts of the ethical and political challenges presented to humanity by nuclear weapons capable of unparalleled destructiveness." Drell added, "I have never heard these profound issues addressed more sensitively and thoughtfully than by Father Hehir, a brilliant scholar and speaker."

The Rev. William L. "Scotty" McLennan Jr., dean for religious life at Stanford, said Hehir "is able to bridge politics, religion and the academy in a seamless way." At McLennan's invitation, Hehir spoke to an audience of 3,500 at Stanford's 2003 baccalaureate, a graduation event celebrating the place of spirituality in graduates' education.

"One of the most striking things about Bryan Hehir is his capability to think clearly and articulate brilliantly very difficult, complex material without missing a beat," McLennan said. Hehir speaks without notes, McLennan added, and "his presence to the audience is palpable."

The Drell Lecture is an annual public event sponsored by CISAC and endowed by Albert and Cicely Wheelon. Each lecture addresses a current and critical national or international security issue that has important scientific or technical dimensions.

On the surface, President Bush's week-long swing through Northeast Asia has been a strong contrast with his recent stormy (and, some say, stumbling) excursion into Latin America.

There was little sign of overt anti-Americanism. And no Asian leader will openly oppose American leadership in the flamboyant manner of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Even prickly China swallowed President Bush's barbs about lack of democratic freedom in China, quietly acknowledging the two powers' differences. In contrast to the meeting of leaders from the Americas, the annual summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Korea will embrace the principles of free trade.

Beneath the polite appearance, however, there is no less a challenge to American leadership in Asia. While Washington fiddled, a powerful momentum has been building up in Asia toward the formation of an East Asian Free Trade Area or, more ambitiously, an East Asian Community, modeled on the European community. Led by China, the East Asian grouping pointedly excludes the United States.

The APEC agenda focuses on an initiative to counter the spread of avian flu and to offer a common push at the WTO meeting in Hong Kong next month to revive the Doha Round of global trade talks. The Bush administration has its own agenda for the APEC meeting: to reposition itself as a leader of economic growth and integration in the region. For this, APEC has the virtue of being a more open organization than those behind the disappointment at the American summit. Its 21 members span the Pacific Rim, bringing together nations from Chile and Mexico to Russia, China and Southeast Asia. But this attention to APEC may be a case of too little, too late. The momentum to give the amorphous APEC an ongoing institutional role, beyond its annual summit meetings, has slowed in recent years. Its pledges for mutual tariff reduction exist almost entirely on paper.

Until this year, the Bush administration barely addressed regional economic issues at APEC. It preferred to use the meetings to promote a post-9/11 security agenda of anti-terrorism. U.S. trade policy has focused more on reaching free trade agreements with a few selected "friends" in that war, such as Singapore and Australia.

Meanwhile a Chinese-sponsored move to hold an East Asian summit offers the most visible expression of a trend of declining American influence in Asia. That meeting will take place in Malaysia in mid-December. The gathering groups the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Japan, China, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand. Pointedly not invited is the United States.

This meeting is an outgrowth of the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) process - an annual dialogue of ASEAN with China, South Korea and Japan that began in December 1997 in the midst of the Asian financial crisis. The APT has grown into an elaborate mechanism for cooperation in a range of areas from finance and agriculture to information technology. This reflects an underlying economic reality - the growth of regional and bilateral trade agreements and the rapid rise of intra-Asian trade.

Until fairly recently, foreign trade in East Asia was dominated by trans-Pacific trade with the United States. But the share of Asian exports headed to the U.S. has dropped dramatically, while those destined for other Asian nations has risen. In the two decades from 1981 to 2001, according to economist Edward Lincoln, the share of intra-regional exports has risen from 32 percent to 40 percent, and intra-regional imports from 32 percent to 50 percent.

Much of the growth of regional integration is being driven by China, which is generating enormous demand for imports of raw materials as well as for semi-finished goods that are assembled for export. China has not been hesitant to use this role to expand its influence in the region. It has embraced the APT as a road towards creation of an East Asian community. At the ASEAN summit last year, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao declared that such a community was a "long-term strategic choice in the interests of China's development." China has also outmatched the U.S. in negotiating free trade agreements, both bilateral and regional. The most impressive is an FTA deal between China and ASEAN set to take effect in 2010. Beijing even dreams of an Asian currency, based on the Chinese yuan, to rival the dollar and the euro.

China is not the first nation to try for such East Asian economic unity. Back in the days when Japan was riding high as an economic superpower, it too talked of leading an East Asian bloc, based on a yen currency zone. As late as 1997, in response to the Asian financial crisis, Japan proposed the creation of an Asian Monetary Fund, a kind of alternate regional financial system. More recently, both South Korea and Japan offered their own visions of an East Asian community in 2001. And both countries tried to match China in the APT by offering to form free trade agreements with ASEAN.

Japan, however, was never as successful as China is likely to be. "It would seem that Japan is a natural counterweight to China, but Tokyo is generally perceived as reactive and incapable of outflanking Beijing," Brad Glosserman, director of research at the Pacific Forum of CSIS, wrote recently. "Its economic dynamism is no match for that of China."

The United States has never been friendly toward efforts to create an East Asian economic bloc, viewing them as chipping away at the global trading system and rivaling American leadership. But Asia is arguably only following in American footsteps -- witness the NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico and the more recent trade pact with Central America.

Many American policymakers believe these developments are partly a product of the failure of the Bush administration to articulate - much less pursue - a strategy to engage East Asia.

"The United States has greater strategic interests in Asia now than it did in Europe before World War I or World War II,'' argued a recent report of the Grand Strategic Choices Working Group, co-chaired by John Hopkin's University's Francis Fukuyama and Princeton's G. John Ikenberry. "Thus," the report continued, "it is unfortunate that part of the problem, in East Asia in particular, is that America's relative lack of interest in tending to the region has caused some allies of the U.S. to doubt our resolve and question the value of resisting unfavorable developments alone."

The report echoes other policymakers in suggesting the U.S. form its own East Asian economic zone with Japan, South Korea and Australia."That's a non-starter,'' says Professor Vinod Aggarwal, director of Berkeley's APEC study center. "Nobody wants to be cut out of the China market."

Privately, Bush administration officials downplay the importance of the East Asian summit in December, pointing to the lack of any concrete agenda. The addition of India, Australia and New Zealand to the invitation list, along with Japan, should effectively counter any Chinese initiative, they believe.

But those countries also fear being left out of whatever may emerge from this process. They cannot afford to be left on the outside, looking in.

Ultimately, neither can the United States. The President's trip is a belated recognition of that fact. But to be more than a momentary gesture, the United States must give East Asia the consistent attention it deserves.