Several years ago, when I was the Director of International Relations Department, I was asked by Tom Claussen, then the President of the World Bank, to write a note on the global order. The note would be used by his speech writer to prepare the draft of a talk he was to give at an event in Tokyo. I wrote a note in which I suggested that after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the world was no longer bipolar with competition for influence by the USSR and the United States. The world had become multipolar. Claussen liked the note and the speech on which it was used was picked by the Western press. Somebody in the Bank revealed that Claussen's speech was based on a note I had prepared. The Economist chided me for using a word that did not exist in English. There were only two poles, north and south. However, it may have been poor English to describe the world as multipolar, but the word caught on and is now commonly used to describe the emerging global order. I mention this to write about the way the world around the large continent of Asia is evolving.

Three sides of Asia – the west, the north and the east separated by thousands of miles of territory – are now dealing with different country influences. Jennifer Kavanagh wrote in an essay published in the opinion pages of The New York Times on Auguist 1, 2026, under the title "A new order is taking shape in the Pacific" that "since President Trump's return to office, uncertainty over his commitment to the defense of........

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