By Tom Plate

It would be churlish to accuse the East Coast foreign-policy establishment of ignoring Asia.

That would be unfair. For the astonishing escape of China from the imbecility of Maoism, the evident economic re-charge and possible remilitarization of Japan, the tragic turmoil in ordinarily brilliant South Korea, the budding of democracy in Islamic Indonesia, the slow but steady turn toward globalization in heretofore tradition-bound India, the testing travails of tortured Taiwan, the potential implosion of Muslim Pakistan, the effort at public-policy innovation and leadership in prosperous Singapore — all of these phenomenally interesting events and many others are of course wholly familiar to the principle figures of the U.S. establishment that scoot and shuttle up and down the corridors of power from Boston to Washington.

And Asia has certainly not fallen below the radar screen of Foreign Affairs, the New York-based establishment journal that has a status in American international policy circles almost as regal as "L'Osservatore Romano" in the Vatican.

Even so, from the perspective of the Atlantic coast, Asia still seems a very, very long plane ride and several colossal conceptual leaps away, whereas Europe is but just a half dozen or so time zones distant and for some reason thoroughly less complicated. The inevitable result is that Asia has played second fiddle to Europe in the American foreign-policy mind for as long as anyone can recall.

No more, asserts Foreign Affairs Editor James Hoge. America's East Coast is getting over its Euro-centrism.

Hoge agrees the center of global gravity is irrevocably and dramatically moving from the West to the East. "Economic power, political power, military power is moving to Asia," says Hoge, "and the old order will have to make adjustments with India and China coming down the road at a fairly fast clip. Why, even the smaller surging nations of Asia are bigger than the bigger ones in Europe."

Central to his thinking is that the historic shift to the East may well prove very bumpy. Geopolitical paradigm shifts, he warns, "seldom occur peacefully." The rise of Germany and Japan in the early 20th century was resisted by the imperial order of the time, triggering colossal military catastrophe. "The transformation now under way is bigger, more complex and more unfamiliar," he warns.

China's economy, he notes, will probably surpass Germany's in less than 10 years and overtake Japan's in less than 20. Suppose a new generation of leadership in both giants was to bury the historic hatchet and combine in alliance against the West?

On the other hand, he also notes, Asia has not recently witnessed a fully enabled China and Japan cohabiting together on the same Asian continent at the same time. Suppose the two giants were to choose to have it out militarily at some point? This would devastate Asia politically — and the world economically.

Crack geopolitical strategists like Singapore's Kishore Mahbubani and George Yeo have likened the new emerging order to a solar system that now features two powerful suns — China and the United States. But Hoge envisions a third: India moving slowly but surely into the picture as a global solar superpower.

Already the major nations of Asia account for most of the world's foreign exchange reserves, he points out, and thus finance most of the U.S. current account deficit, which is now gigantic: "The bottom line is that we face an enormous transformation of power, attended by unavoidable dislocations," he says.

To date, the U.S. response to the new reality seems more old-style — mainly with military moves — than new-age global. A key element appears to be an emerging policy of "soft containment" for growing China.

Hoge, as a certified foreign-policy intellectual — and skillful gatekeeper of our leading international journal — is trying to make a serious contribution to reorienting American foreign policy in the direction of what used to be called the Orient. His effort could prove helpful and timely for an America that seems lately to have made some very bad calls and shockingly misconceived policy turns.

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.