China Law Blog

Richard Armitage, former deputy Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, is of the strong view the United States is missing the boat in Asia. I agree.

The Australian interviews Armitage in a story entitled, "China wins as 'US neglects region,'" on how President Bush and Condoleezza Rice have been ignoring Asia, to the United State's detriment.

Armitage nicely analogizes current US foreign policy to five year olds playing soccer:

"In every measure, China is making real hay right throughout Asia," said Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush.

"It's not that we're ignoring Asia a little bit; we're ignoring it totally. We're playing foreign policy at the moment like five-year-olds play soccer, everyone is going after the ball at once rather than covering the whole field.

"Right now, we're just so preoccupied with Iraq that we're ignoring Asia totally."

The article goes on to describe Armitage as "the senior official with the greatest experience of Asia within the Bush administration and his departure has left the administration short of Asian expertise." Armitage lambastes Condoleeza Rice for her "disastrous decision to miss two out of three ASEAN regional forums," having missed the ASEAN meeting in Laos in 2005 and again earlier this year in Manila:

Ms. Rice "has also declined to stay for the second day of this year's APEC leaders' summit in Sydney on Sunday, which Mr Bush is skipping." Mr Bush will be represented at Sunday's meeting by US trade representative Susan Schwab. Dr Rice will fly home with the President rather than spend the day with 20 other Asia-Pacific leaders.

Armitage "said US business was unhappy with the lack of senior administration attention on Asia. 'Business is disappointed with the focus of national attention not being on Asia, but business is going off and doing their own thing in Asia and that's good,' he said." Armitage sees Bush as having "radically underestimated the importance of Asia."

Around four or five years ago, I on a Seoul to San Francisco flight when President George HW Bush (the father) walked by. Everyone else was asleep so I called out to him. "President Bush," I said. "President Bush." "I was just reading an article about you." He replied, "oh really, good or bad?" I started to answer when he leaned over and saw the article and remarked. "Oh, it's by Fouad [Ajami], I like Fouad. Ohhhh, this article on Jim [That's former Secetary of State, James Baker, to you readers, but apparently it's "Jim" to former President Bush and me]. I heard about this article..... Jim didn't like this article." He then very graciously signed the article for me and moved on. The article was on a just released book with the thesis that James Baker was the worst secretary of state in US history. Fouad Ajami concurred. Seems at the time, many agreed with this assessment of Baker.

Seems to me Condoleeza Rice has caught up. Do you agree?