Asia in Washington: Exploring the Penumbra of Transnational Power

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments Americans, like people of virtually all nations, reflexively view the world through the perspective of their nation-state. The doings of the president make front-page news almost daily, and the White House stands among our preeminent national symbols. The vital details of the nation’s birth and growth are commonplace to our schoolchildren, and the nation’s capital is a symbolic arena that we visit and revisit, vicariously at least, almost every day. Yet the actual details of everyday political life in Washington, and how America’s capital really does interact with the world, remain remarkably obscure. Neither I nor, I suppose, the reader has ever shaken hands with a nation-state. Yet we have no better concept to help us interpret life in the nation’s capital or to understand how it actually relates to the broader world. My personal fascination with Washington and its meaning for the broader world began early in my junior high school career, as I raptly listened to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address being piped into my seventh-grade classroom. Having just returned from Southeast Asia, where my father had been working with the Ford Foundation on development projects, I empathized with the globalism embodied in Kennedy’s words and was mesmerized with the solemn symbolism of that statecentric, presidential-succession event. Washington seemed to me to be a place where the world could be changed, through the application of American ideas and power, and I vowed to understand it, somehow, someday. xv 00-2538-1 fm.indd 15 3/12/14 4:18 PM xvi Preface and Acknowledgments My first chance came nearly a decade later, in my undergraduate years, when I served as a congressional intern with the House of Representatives ’ Banking and Currency Committee. Over the ensuing four decades and more, I have come back to Washington in many incarnations —as a researcher with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission; to testify before various congressional committees; as Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and as a fresh Schedule C State Department appointee, en route to Tokyo to assist the U.S. ambassador to Japan. For the past decade I have taught at SAIS/Johns Hopkins University and headed the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies there. Viewing Washington from these multiple angles over nearly half a century has convinced me that the statecentric paradigm cannot adequately explain either the way Washington really operates or its impact on the broader world. I have come to realize that one needs to start with the trees in the forest—the individual decisionmakers, working in law firms, universities, think tanks, media organizations, and multilateral institutions, as well as the U.S. government. One also needs to understand the personal networks that connect all these bodies, and the various social communities that they form, to grasp how the U.S. capital actually works. Equally, one also has to be conscious of the rapid, however imperceptible, pace of recent change in the nation’s capital. Today’s Washington is profoundly different from the town where I worked as a congressional student intern during the Vietnam War. The direction of Washington’s incessant, continuing change is instructional and was a principal motive for my writing this book. Washington is growing at once more pluralistic, especially outside the government, and also more global. It is rapidly developing a shadowy “penumbra of power”—a diverse web of nongovernmental institutions with significant government contacts and access—that is mediating a deepening relationship between official Washington and the broader world. Even as the American nation-state has become geopolitically preeminent since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the broad Washington sociopolitical community has also become more interdependent with external actors and agenda-setting efforts. And no one has been more vigorous in striving to influence the course of Washington than the nations of Asia, together with related transnational networks of both Asian and American origin. 00-2538-1 fm.indd 16 3/12/14 4:18 PM Preface and Acknowledgments xvii Both economic and security impulses propel the countries of Asia to influence America’s capital in its varied official and unofficial dimensions , although their effectiveness varies, as we shall see. The research presented here began nearly eight years ago when I asked my student research assistant at SAIS, Erin Murphy, to put together a list of recent think tank activities...