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 — U.S.-Japan, U.S.-Korea, U.S.-China, U.S.-Japan-Korea, U.S.-Japan-China — 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 — like the nations themselves — were evolving and we were trying to identify a strategic logic to guide them.

We were laying out “first principles” and over time we succeeded. As conversations matured and those frameworks consolidated, we dug deeper into the issues that countries had to tackle if those partnerships were to remain relevant. So, for example, discussions of domestic politics and their impact on foreign policy gave way to detailed assessments of aid and development programs and how to ensure that we were working most efficiently and effectively to achieve shared objectives. That process has continued and discussions in almost every field have become still more focused and technical.

In recent years, the guiding framework has eroded. It is popular — and easy — to attribute new uncertainties to the presence of Donald Trump in the White House and the populist tide he represents. He and it are part of the problem, but they are as much representative of larger........

© The Japan Times