Kerry: the choice of Asia?
John Kerry could be the first American president to begin his term already armed with a wealth of personal experience in Asia. It began soon after his university graduation, when he joined the US navy. Sent to Vietnam as an officer on a gunboat plying the treacherous waters of the Mekong Delta, his combat service earned him a chestful of military honours. He then shot to fame as an impassioned critic of the war, calling it 'a mistake' in a testimony to the US Senate.
But apart from returning from Vietnam as a war hero, he has immersed himself in the business of the region for years as the ranking Democrat in the Senate subcommittee for East Asian and Pacific affairs. He has walked that beat extensively and knows many of the major Asian players personally.
It is worth wondering whether such a career profile would make a difference in the way a US leader deals with the region. It should, in at least one respect - he would have a much shorter learning curve. He would know that it was better not to get too rough with China and Japan, like the newly elected Bill Clinton did, or needlessly snub a visiting South Korean president, in the way of George W. Bush.
His Senate record suggests that his instincts as a Massachusetts liberal could govern his policy towards the region. That is an encouraging prospect for Asia's democracies. The first amendment he offered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sought to reverse the US policy of propping up the Marcos regime in the Philippines. He was the only Democrat president Ronald Reagan assigned to the US team sent to observe the 1986 Philippine election.
He caused a stir when he rushed to the cathedral in Manila to hear complaints from computer operators that the vote count was being manipulated.
'There, we learned of the corruption at the centre of the election itself, and that was really the moment that everything turned, and it sounded the death knell for president Marcos,' he later recalled.
He has also spoken out at various times for the protection of Tibetans and Acehnese. He feels the pain of the developing world, which is probably why (along with being a captive of the environmental lobby) he has stuck his neck out for the Kyoto Protocol which exempts China, India, Brazil and other still-industrialising nations from reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
On the campaign trail, the combative, sharply-partisan Senator Kerry is a markedly different persona from the one his peers at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are familiar with. This is a clubby, patrician body, not given to extreme gestures even when it was run by the bone-deep conservative, Jesse Helms. In the committee chambers, Senator Kerry is the soul of collegiality. Senator Craig Thomas, the Wyoming Republican who chaired the East Asian subcommittee, often turned his hearings over to Senator Kerry when he had other business to attend to.
There is nothing in the record to suggest that Senator Kerry would be anything but a cautious pragmatist, solidly in the mainstream of US foreign policy.
When Beijing seemed poised to fire missiles at Taiwan, he joined his colleagues in urging the US to be clearer about its intentions, in order to preserve the peace. But at another time, he withheld support for a bill to provide Taiwan with a theatre-missile defence shield. That would be 'as provocative and potentially dangerous' as leaving Taiwan unarmed, he said. 'There is a fine line that needs to be walked here.'
Many Asians would, no doubt, like to see another Democrat in the White House, remembering the warm and fuzzy Bill Clinton or, even further back, the inspirational John F. Kennedy. But some caution is in order. Election-year rhetoric tends to exaggerate and even distort the differences between Republican and Democratic policies. The bottom line in both parties is to defend US interests.
In the final analysis, the difference may only be in their degrees of likeability. Then, Asians may have to decide whether a plain-speaking, syntax-whacking Texan or a sonorous, preachy New Englander would be less grating on their nerves.
Eduardo Lachica is a veteran analyst of Asian affairs based in Washington
