Asia and the United States: The Challenges Ahead

The extraordinary events in the Pacific-Asian region over the past year pose two overarching challenges for U.S. foreign policy: how to respond to the crisis in Asia's Leninist societies, and how to confront the problems arising from the accelerating economic interdependence of the region's market economies. In addition, there is the question of gauging the basic political trends throughout the Pacific-Asian region-in particular, whether a recent general movement toward greater political openness is likely to endure.

The question of how to respond to the diverse developments within the Leninist world has assumed critical importance. For the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution, a peaceful evolution beyond Leninism seems under way. It is important to note, however, that while such a prospect appears close at hand in most East European societies, as one travels further east the possibilities lessen for a near-term establishment of parliamentary democracy. The political fault line runs through that great Eurasian power, the Soviet Union.

The recent stirring upheavals in Eastern Europe were stimulated by changes in Moscow's policies: Mikhail Gorbachev's bold extension of political openness and his repeal of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which had proclaimed that no nation was free to leave the socialist camp. But uncertainties for the future are embedded in Gorbachev's rejection of political pluralism for the U.S.S.R. and, more important, in difficulties arising from ethnic conflicts within the Russian empire and Gorbachev's efforts to revive the Soviet economy. Still farther east, Asia's Leninist leaders proclaim that experimentation shall be confined principally to the economic realm, with the vital political ramparts to be protected at all cost.

What accounts for the growing cleavage within the Leninist world? Is it that one major stream of the Western cultural tradition has now reasserted itself in those societies that border on Western Europe? Have traditions of individualism and quasi-independent social institutions (including the Christian church) kept the spark of pluralistic politics alive? Should one give equal credit to the proximity to Eastern Europe of the examples of dynamism and renewal to be seen in the open societies of Western Europe and the United States? Socialist leaders have recognized for some time that the competition for power and influence is being lost to such societies.