By Tom Plate

There is a time to lurch and a time to pause. The time of the American lurch was seven months ago — into Iraq. Now is the time for pause — America needs to do less and think things out more. There is no better place to develop a thoughtful long view than in Asia, where time is often measured not in ticks and tocks but in epochs and millennia.

President Bush's current trip to Asia couldn't have come at a better juncture for the United States and his administration. The Iraq war went well but the peace did not. The "road map" to Middle East peace is pockmarked with land mines. The Islamic world clashes not only with the West but also within itself — between moderates and extremists.

Even so, U.S. reactions seem marked by mistakes and missteps rather than superpower steadiness.

Asia offers America a lot more value than just electronic exports, exotic cuisines and — now — manned space flight. That the Chinese completed their first one just prior to Bush's departure may have been an accident of timing, but the message was intentional. China is beginning to fill the geopolitical void, without (as yet, anyway) the global menace of the former Soviet Union. China's economy may be but a tenth of the size of America's, but no one doubts that the gap is narrowing and, as it does, so mushrooms China.

Similarly, Asia's clout on the global stage is reassuming historic dimensions. Even now, by most measurements, Asia, if united, would be the world's largest economic bloc. The totality of its gross domestic product exceeds that of the United States by 50 percent.

With economic clout comes political stature. Beijing and Tokyo — minor foreign-affairs players even in their own Asian back yard — are now burnishing their diplomatic image. The most obvious example is the North Korean problem, where both are publicly involved.

China, for its part, is taking an increasingly regional view of its diplomatic aims. It is working overtime to increase trade ties, especially with Southeast Asia, with two goals in mind: One is to lower neighbors' fears about China's future economic hegemony. Two is to increase the region's economic dependency on China.

Japan, under dynamic Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, looks to be developing a more global perspective. It is seeking to use its military forces in a peaceful way while at the same time reminding the world that its so-called Self-Defense Forces are the world's second most technologically advanced army.

After Bush's tete-a-tete in Tokyo with Koizumi, Southeast Asia looms big on Bush's itinerary.

Take the Philippines' Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, announcing her ambition to remain president after earlier indications she had none. With her country's internal-security problems, she fully supports the Bush anti-terror effort. Thailand's strongman, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, is, like the American president, a conservative CEO-type leader, and his words of counsel likely will be easy for Bush to swallow.

Singapore's Goh Chok Tong government, with Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew in the background, is a tough-minded group that lives on the edge of a political volcano and has lots to say to America.

All of the above encounters will work to educate the relatively young American president without threatening his Texan testosterone.

But Bush may come to shove in Bali when he meets Megawati Sukarnoputri, the elected president of Indonesia, the thousand-island archipelago with a million problems that's home to the globe's largest population of Muslims. Bush's anti-terror foreign policy works best on simple cases (Saddam Hussein, bad) but falters in more complex applications, for example, in Indonesia. How do you attack the problem without cracking open this fragmented nation of 230 million and driving waves of refugees into neighboring Singapore and Australia, two of Bush's most sympathetic allies in Asia?

There's no easy answer except, perhaps, patience and persistence.

Tom Plate, whose column appears regularly in The Honolulu Advertiser, is a UCLA professor and founder of the nonprofit Asia Pacific Media Network. Reach him at tplate@ucla.edu.