Battle of the Asian Summits; Asian states want to hedge against protectionism in the U.S. and EU with stronger regional trade strategies.

Byline: Jeffrey E. Garten (Garten is the Juan Trippe Professor at the Yale School of Management. (He can be reached atjeffrey.garten@yale.edu.))

The world's attention will be focused on Busan, South Korea, this week, where the heads of state of some of the world's most dynamic economies will gather at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation annual meeting. But that summit is likely to be trumped by two others coming in December. In Kuala Lumpur, the leaders of 16 Asia-Pacific countries, from Japan to India and from South Korea to Australia, will hold the first-ever summit of what is being called the East Asian Community, with the United States notably not invited. Later that week in Hong Kong, the 148 members of the World Trade Organization will try to agree on the next steps in the Doha Round, an effort to liberalize global trade. Those two meetings will highlight tensions between regional and global approaches to trade and finance. And the outcomes will provide a clearer picture of how the winds will be blowing in the global economy over the next decade.

In Kuala Lumpur, Asian leaders will celebrate the economic dynamism of China, India and perhaps Japan as well. They will try to harness this momentum to build much closer regional cooperation, even in the face of serious obstacles such as gaps in economic development between countries (for example, South Korea vs. Indonesia), different political systems (China vs. India) and political tension (Taiwan, Kashmir, North Korea and growing rivalries between Beijing and Tokyo).

On balance, the forces of Asian unity seem ascendant. The economies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have become highly intertwined with China's. Trade between the Middle Kingdom and Southeast Asia is growing by 20 percent a year. In addition, many Asian governments want to hedge against protectionism in the United States and the EU with a stronger regional trade and investment strategy.

Will we be seeing the emergence of just the sort of defensive Asian economic bloc that was proposed by the then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in the mid-1990s? Probably not, because most Asian nations are too tied into the world economy to risk confrontation. But some keen observers of Asia, such as Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, have hinted that the East Asian summit may one day be seen as the real beginning of the Pacific Century, the moment when Asian leaders recognized that political and economic power is shifting from West to East and came together to demand a ...