You're looking at a newly minted American. I became a citizen last year, which prompted a friend to comment: “You must be the only European to have become an American under Bush.” As you probably know the citizenship application involves an English test, a dictation. You’ll be pleased to hear I passed. The first sentence I had to write out was: “I want to be a good American.” The second was “I plan to work very hard every day.” Every day! No Sabbath, no day of rest. As you see, the work ethic is alive and well in the United States, which is a good thing given the fierce work rate in this part of the world, and the French work rate, which is another story.

That work ethic is part of the enduring vitality of the U.S., a much maligned country these days. America’s capacity for self-renewal is astonishing. The 300 millionth American was born just recently, according to the statisticians, just 39 years after the 200 millionth American. Back then, in 1967, 76 percent of the American population was white. Today that figure stands at 56 percent. I know of no other country so capable of rapid adaptation. I know of no other country where the self-correcting mechanisms of periodic excess remain so vigorous: witness the Democratic triumph in elections this month. The stable embrace of change is a hallmark of the United States, part of its continuing allure.

But that allure has been tarnished of late. Not destroyed, tarnished. Nothing I am going to say today should suggest I do not continue to believe in American vitality, or in the centrality of America’s role in the world. I am not among those who lightly wave away the Pax Americana that we live and have lived for some time now; I am not among the cheap-shot denigrators of the American men and women in the far-flung garrisons of Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East who provide the lineaments of global stability, however unstable the world on television may sometimes look. The world today is divided between those who see the United States as a force for good and the growing number who see it as a force for evil. I know where I stand on that question. Still, it would be foolish to overlook or underestimate the damage.

Yes, damage. Over the past five years, since it was attacked, the United States has entered a troubled period. A time of unease. It is involved in an intractable and costly war; it is seeking, so far without success, the right post-9/11 balance between the demands of security and the imperatives of freedom; it is suffering the isolating consequences of unilateral action; its moral authority has been eroded by those global by-words for American turpitude – Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay; and it is witnessing the rise of a broad anti-Americanism, a global movement whose manifestations include the moral contempt of many Europeans, the restiveness or resentment of some Asians, and the jihadist fury of a small minority of Muslims bent on destroying the West.

That is a lot for any country, even a country of America’s unprecedented power, to confront. Damage has consequences; it is of the essence of damage, whether in personal or international relations, to cast its shadow forward. So allow me to list some of the ways in America’s troubles will affect us.

1) The United States is stretched. Iraq is no ephemeral engagement. Ask the reserve units of the armed forces. Ask the Treasury. Being over-extended, America will seek to avoid new military adventures for the next several years. Leaders from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran to Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang are aware of this. They have been emboldened. Facing an Iran with nuclear ambitions and a North Korea with nuclear arms, America will look to the European Union and China respectively for help. But neither in Europe nor in Beijing is American discomfort entirely unwelcome; expect the assistance to be modest or guarded.

2) America perceives itself as a transformational power, and so its energies will continue to be consumed by the idea of changing the Middle East, with Bush or without Bush. As Frances Fitzgerald wrote of an earlier American adventure, the one that ended in Saigon in 1975: “Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind. They believe in the future as if it were a religion, they believe that there is nothing they cannot accomplish.” Iraq, like Vietnam before it, has been a sobering experience, but I believe this transformational impulse – a calling to seek the betterment of mankind – is in large measure inseparable from the American idea. The Middle East is in ferment; the years of Brezhnevian inertia are over; American intervention, the Internet and new media are prizing open a stultified world. Right now, the political forces released – from Hezbollah to Hamas – look more menacing than benign. Suicide bombers have more impact than liberal thinkers, but the liberal thinkers exist. Might the turmoil reflect the very early days of a Middle Eastern “Glasnost?” I don’t think that’s a preposterous question even if it is an unfashionable one. In any event, however the immediate future in Iraq is managed, a generational American undertaking has been engaged.

3) That U.S. undertaking is occurring as Asia, long known for conflict and economic backwardness, has entered a period of astonishing growth. America’s burden is also Asia’s opportunity. I feel an almost physical sense of relief being here. Hope, not fear, is in the air. Asia is in a mood to seize its opportunities. Look how China and India decide to deal with a lingering border dispute that once provoked a war: by doubling bilateral trade. When goods change hands, shedding blood for a mountain pass begins to look silly. Asia had learned that.
I arrived here from Vietnam. The country is in vertical take-off mode. The image I take away from it is of young women among the river of bikers in the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City clutching their increasingly chic cell phones and engaged in animated conversation. Iraq? The war on terror? Nuclear proliferation? Not on their radar. Not on anybody’s radar, as far as I could see. In a naïve way, I thought they might be – after all the United States was at war Vietnam just three decades ago for a cause not unrelated to the cause in Iraq – but in Asia the events of 30 years ago are ancient history. Growth, foreign investment, modernization, self-improvement, self-enrichment, the future: these are the buzzwords. They have created a formidable, focused energy. As Cheng Li has written of Asia”s rise: “The shift is comparable to the rise of Europe in the 17th century and the rise of America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” I think he’s right. “Go East, young man, go East, young woman!” ought to be the motto of any self-respecting western business school. We are in the midst of a slow but inexorable shift in the global balance of power, one whose full effect and impact will probably not be clear until the second half of this century.

4) But what does this shift signify? We know, at least in theory, what America stands for? What does Asia’s rise, and particularly China’s, signify? What are the values accompanying their arrival on the world stage? I believe we are already beginning to see some answers. Indeed, I would argue that the American-dominated unipolar world that emerged from the abrupt end of the cold war is already history. In retrospect, it will be viewed as the 17-year interlude that produced the Iraq war and much disquiet before the emergence of a new bipolar world whose centers are Washington and Beijing. Those centers are unequal for the moment, U.S. power being greater, but the China of President Hu Jintao has now come far enough on the road to superpower status and the articulation of how its muscle will be used to establish a new bi-polarity. Countries once again have options: the American road or the Chinese. America’s embrace has strings attached: freedom, democracy human rights, the rule of law – the whole Iraq-tarnished lexicon of the luminous “city upon a hill.” China’s is unburdened by such preoccupations; it comes, as President Hu Jintao, said recently, “with no strings attached.” If the Washington consensus is ideologically interventionist, the emerging Beijing consensus looks ideologically agnostic. It prizes peace, development and trade. China is not in the business of exporting war, development models or political blueprints. It wants to do business, morality be damned. Democracy, in its world view, comes in a very distant second to growth – if it comes in at all. The kindest view of the Chinese position is this: growth solves most problems, and no problems, be they of poverty or enslavement, are solvable without it.

Do these ideologically distinct positions make the United States and China rivals? In some senses, yes. If you look at Myanmar, or Sudan, or Zimbabwe, where American concerns for democracy are offset by a Chinese appetite for raw materials, you would have to conclude that China’s strength dilutes, even undermines, American power. If you look at North Korea or Iran, you would also have to conclude that China’s influence limits America’s options. And if you look around Asia – at least outside Japan – you would have to say that countries are now hedging their bets, wanting China and America as offsetting lovers. One of the giants gets taken to bed one day, another the next. It sure makes life interesting. Finally, if you look at America’s Asian moves – the nuclear pact with India, the reinforced alliance with Japan, the courting of Vietnam and Indonesia (including the armed forces of those countries) – you would have to conclude – official denials notwithstanding – that containing or constraining Chinese power is an overarching strategic U.S. aim.

Still, we are very far from a cold-war rivalry of the old Washington-Moscow variety. The American-Chinese relationship is symbiotic as much as it is confrontational. The two countries find their fates interwoven by globalization. If American consumers had wanted to indulge on the products of our erstwhile Russian enemy, they’d have been largely confined to Kalashnikovs and third-rate vodka. Today, for everything from sophisticated electronics to shoes, the U.S. consumer depends on Chinese manufacturing. The smog that looms over Hong Kong – and is, I’ve discovered in just 24 hours, a principal subject of conversation here – is directly tied to Americans’ inexhaustible credit-driven thirst for cheap stuff from Walmart. American just don’t want the filth-spewing factory in their backyard; they’re rather have it in Shenzhen. Hu depends on Bush’s economy to ingest a huge tide of Chinese imports; Bush depends on Hu’s central bankers to go on buying American debt to finance the deficits. They are tied at the hip. If the U.S. economy crashes, or the dollar goes way south, China will be hurting; if China moves out of dollars to euros, all bets are off.

These links, part of the intricate web of our globalized world, are complex and salutary. Salutary because, in their way, the links demand that compromises be found. When US-Chinese tensions rise, they counsel sanity. They counsel against protectionism and for openness. They are also important because China and the US, the powers that will dominate our children’s lives, have much to learn from each other.

At the end of Graham Greene’s masterful novel, “The Quiet American”, which I reread in Vietnam, a French officer comments of the death of Alden Pyle, the innocent, freedom-promoting, anti-Communist American, that: “In a way you could say that he died for democracy.”
To which the narrator, a world-weary journalist who has seen it all, responds: “I wouldn’t know how to translate that into Vietnamese.’’

Democracy is a relative value here. Indeed, Asia in general counsels the danger of absolute and rigid values. That is part of its appeal at a time when fanatical interpretations of the great monotheistic religions in the West and the Middle East are causing much bloodshed and division. There’s been enough conflict over the past decades for peace to be a much more compelling value than democracy in Asia. There’s been enough suffering for stability and economic progress to be prized above all else. I think President Bush is right about the basic urge of every human being to be free; I am certain that the Chinese system will come under many pressures over the coming years. But meanwhile I also think that Asia’s success demands a form of ideological pliancy, patience and pragmatism from Washington that have been in short supply in recent years.

As Greene writes: “Isms and Ocracies. Give me facts.”

The facts for China are challenging. That smog will equal tens of millions of health problems down the road. By 2025, the number of elderly people in China will have increase from 130 million to 280 million, or almost 20 percent of the population. Hundreds of millions will have migrated to cities from urban area. Its needs for oil and raw materials are staggering. Already in Africa – where corrupt strong men have made democracy a prized commodity in many states – China is confronting the first serious contesting of its value-free foreign policy. Super power status does not come on the cheap. At home, growing inequality is the immediate impact of globalization, as it has been elsewhere. The rich get richer, the poor stay where they are, unless huge efforts are made in such critical areas as education. Can a closed, or at best partially open, political system cope with all of this? I don’t know. The Chinese Communist Party has played its hand brilliantly up to now, which is why China’s ascendancy is so vigorous. But the ability of America – or indeed India – to adapt to change is far greater because the checks and balances of an open system bring movement without rupture. How China will deal with this central conundrum remains an open question.

Which is why American as an Asian power remains so important. Just as the European Union could only prosper with America as a European power offsetting Franco-German rivalry, so China’s exponential yet smooth growth only seems possible to me with America around to reassure the Japanese, the Vietnamese and others. China needs time – and Asia needs time – to work through the new strategic architecture of an area containing one great power and one dangerous cold-war relic in North Korea. The worst thing for Asia would be an America so consumed with the Middle East or Iraq, or so inclined to isolationism, that it turned away. I don’t believe that is going to happen. I certainly hope it doesn’t happen.

So, in some odd way, will the United States be the midwife to Chinese global domination, as Britain was to America’s? That could be, although I think some balance of power is more likely because America’s power, unlike Britain’s, is far from exhausted and the country is still young. A bi-polar American-Chinese world does not strike me as a bad thing to wish for.

For that to happen without major conflict, I would rewrite the dictation given to neophyte Americans such as myself. First sentence: “I want to be a good American and so I will spend some time in Asia.” Second sentence: “I plan to work harder than the French and almost as hard as the Chinese.” Third sentence: “Clean air is important to the future of the planet.”

There’s a lot to do, this is a demanding world, but I know of no better place than Asia to confront the myriad challenges, a region of hope not fear. The world needs more hopes. I feel privileged to be here.