Asia

The United States is bogged down in what appears to be an unwinnable war in Iraq; it is facing very unpleasant options in regard to neighboring Iran’s nuclear program; senior NATO officers say that the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating fast; in the former Soviet Union, Georgia and Russia are moving toward military confrontation, with the U.S. seemingly unable to restrain either; in large swaths of Latin America, new nationalist and populist movements are challenging U.S. interests.

And then there were nine. Nine nuclear powers, that is, including North Korea. There will be more.

Four points to make:

First, there will be much hand-wringing here in the United States about what the American president -- Bill Clinton, George W. Bush -- did or did not do to stop the North Koreans from ramping up their nuclear program over the past dozen years or so.

Michael Zielenziger's new book, Shutting Out the Sun, offers an intelligent, insightful look into the economic disquiet and disturbing social trends afflicting Japan. Though once on the verge of eclipsing the United States as the world’s dominant economic power, Japan failed to recover fully from the economic collapse of the early 1990s and now confronts a Japanese society and economy jeopardized by disaffected youth.

South Korea's 7-3 victory over the United States in the World Baseball Classic on Tuesday wasn't the only sporting news that made front-page headlines in Seoul last week. On the same day that the South Korean team "spanked the U.S." -- as the English-language edition of the Korea Times put it -- the nation's prime minister was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had played golf with some shady businessmen on a national holiday that coincided with the start of a crippling national rail strike.

When he served as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Harvard President Lawrence Summers frequently stitched into his opening remarks an excessively hubris-laden assessment of American power. At one such speech, he asserted that the "world has never seen a nation such as the United States that possesses such unrivaled economic might...that the world has never seen a country such as the United States of America that had such a degree of global military power and global reach that a serious rival can not even be imagined."

A pattern has established itself in Western coverage of so-called "people power" revolutions. The revolutions themselves are reported on television and on the front page of newspapers, and extensively praised and analyzed on the editorial pages. Distinguished staff correspondents fly in to cover the story. The revolution is described as part of a growing wave of democracy sweeping the region or the world. The latest examples of this treatment have been the Western responses to the "colored" revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

Will the 21st century be another "American Century" or will it be the first "Asian Century"? A peaceful -- for now -- struggle has been joined.

For the past few weeks Americans have been focused on news from the Vatican. And for the past few years the bulk of "foreign news" has concerned the Middle East. But in the Far East three huge fuses are burning.

Political theorists don't agree on much, but they tend toward a healthy majority on one issue: large, vibrant middle classes spur demands for greater democracy and help sustain democratic institutions.