It¡¯s been more than 35 years since I started working on Asian affairs. When I began that journey, the United States was a reflexively transatlantic nation; most people laboring on what we now call geopolitics, or foreign and national security policy, focused on U.S. relations with Europe.
Most folks who worked on Asia dug deep into particular countries and saw them more as acted upon, rather than independent actors. There was a slowly rising chorus that warned that the world was changing and Asia demanded more attention and understanding. For a while, I went to Europe each year to teach a course on ¡°why Asia matters.¡± There were sessions for both students and business executives.
When I joined Pacific Forum, the think tank with which I have been affiliated since 2001, the organization was hosting bilateral and trilateral dialogues with every major U.S. partner in Northeast Asia ¡ª U.S.-Japan, U.S.-Korea, U.S.-China, U.S.-Japan-Korea, U.S.-Japan-China ¡ª and we joined or ran large multilateral discussions to hear the views of other nations. While the alliances and relationships were longstanding, the circumstances that shaped them ¡ª like the nations themselves ¡ª were evolving and we were trying to identify a strategic logic to guide them.
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