How the World Sees It: The world may have high hopes for the new administration, but the EU at least should look to its own house first; Asians do not want to be lectured. At the same time, unlike Europe, they do not lay down a standard to which America must conform.

Byline: Shekhar Gupta (Gupta is editor in chief of The Indian Express.)

The new Asia knows how much it matters to America. So the first thing the region would expect is that the new White House would appreciate how differently it thinks from traditional American ally Europe. Unlike Europe, Asia does not have a partisan position on U.S. politics. For more than a decade, as Asian tigers produced growth unprecedented in modern history and wrestled with complexities of rising incomes, nation-building and security, America too seemed like a natural ally to most of Asia. It follows, therefore, that Asia would expect a great deal of continuity from the new White House. But also some change, both of nuance and of substance.

Unlike Europe, the U.S.-Asia relationship does not carry the baggage of culture or history. Our relationship with America has been more straightforward--one of trade and security, jobs and immigration, give and take. Asia is the world's fastest-growing market. Without American buyers, many of the tiger economies of Asia would be dead. Asians are the fastest-growing group of immigrants in America, also the most successful and the richest.

Still, Asia has its complexities. It's not just the world's fastest-growing region economically but the most rapidly democratizing. It does not nurse a legacy of vicious anti-Americanism and yet is home to 60 percent or so of the world's Muslims and nearly 95 percent of its communists. It produced a majority of the world's new billionaires in the past five years but also has a majority of the world's poor. As the biggest, and the oldest victims of terrorism, Asian powers found it easy to share America's agony on 9/11. But Asians were not used to the linear, black-or-white, either-you-are-with-us-or-against-us response that came out of a wounded Washington.

That prompted a rethink, inspired a new anti-American public opinion that was at odds with the region's establishment. Asian governments, invariably, knew what best served their national interest. But their populations discovered a suspicion of America that many of us believed had long disappeared. Several Asian governments were left to answer a peculiar challenge: how do you engage with America when a strong minority among your own people, or, in some cases a vast majority, are deeply suspicious of its ...