Okay so, and then the other element of limitation is that some of these I think Chinese in South East Asia are viewed with some suspicions on the products and countries in South East Asia. Now the US limitations, oh boy long list the US limitations in Asia. Public speaking throughout the region many times in the past decade, every time I went I said I’m from America and then I would go like this you know protect myself from the audience throwing things at me but basically it had, most of it had to do a long list of opposition to Bush administration foreign policies the invasion of Iraq, the militarization of the war and terror, abuses and the prison system, hard line and North Korea for a long time, low priority to multi-laterisms low priority to climate change, these were the main ones now today, the and after they added to this has been uncertainty about the US economic leadership and the management of the US economy, all of these things are real liability, real drags on the US position in Asia, in the atmosphere of either the opposition to the United States foreign policy what were the US these are very difficult to find. Nobody writes about US Strengths in Asia. And so I founded by talking to these 200 officials the other ones had told me and un boiling it down here there are two fundamental strengths of the United States in Asia and this is why the US is the leader in Asia and these are the things you can measure to see if the US is the cline or not. The first one has to do with security, in Asia governments matter they make the decisions, they are influenced by various opinions but in the end they make their decisions on the base of their own consolations and they are very calculating, what did these governments want, they want development, they want nation [IB], what do they need for development they need stability. Then you ask them is Asia stable? And they say not really. One of the secrets of the region is that most of the government officials in this country don’t really trust each other, they act like they like each other when they meet in these meetings they put on those funny shirts and they smile and so forth, they don’t trust each other. And so what you see in public between Japan and China is emblematic throughout the region, so where do they get stability? Where do they get security? Well about 30 percent of these officials, while knowing that I’m from the United will look at me and say, this is a strange country. Its very far away, its very big and this country is willing to spend 50 to a 100 billion dollars a year to keep a military presence in Asia that keeps stability in Asia and the young people of this country are willing to sign up for the military service. They come to Asia and get killed if necessary to keep stability in Asia and they look at me and they say, this is a crazy country, they said and there is nothing like it, nobody else in Asia will do this and we need it. This is fundamental.

If this changes, then those calculations of those Asian Governments will change, then the US is in decline, if it doesn’t change, the US is in, isn’t that total class by itself, no one is even close to doing anything like this. And then the second dimension is that these are export oriented economies. They want development and they need to export and they recognize they trade a lot with China and other countries and so forth but at the end of the day they recognizes they are heavily dependent on trade outside the region and what do they see? Well, they see the US absorbing a trade deficit with ancient countries in the last good trade year of 2008 of $350 billion and they say nobody else is going to do that and it’s very costly on the US does it.

And so if you are looking for [parameters] of the US decline see it the US becomes the isolationist, see if the US becomes protectionist, if it does, then it’s going to be an [IB] measure but if it doesn’t, no one else does it. China has a trade surplus and China is not going to have any of its soldiers getting carried in any place in Asia, it will get killed for protecting China interest but not…they are not going to do anything they wouldn’t ordinarily do and they are not alone. Most Asian [IB] are like this. And so other features of the US [IB] in Asia, George Bush did a good job of managing great panel relations, Obama is trying to continue that trend, he’s done pretty well the US military is all over Asia. The US, they have relationships all over the region and why do people want to interact with the US military. First and this is the security apparatus intelligence too, why? Well because they are good at what they are doing and so when you have exercise with the United States, when you have educational programs, exchanges you learn a lot from the United States, they like that. And so if you need intelligence information, let’s say you are a smaller country middle country and say we’ve got this terrorist group that just showed up, what about them? And America says, [IB] stuff about that , would you share with us and then we have a relationship with them , they want to share or they say we got this insurgence in the field with the Philippines, or had these people running around, shooting people and chopping off their heads and so forth and we can’t find them. And the Americans said, well, we’ve got a machine. And they say, what do you mean a machine? The machine comes in, there they are, they’ll go get them and so this is very attractive to a lot of people but this is the main reason why these countries want to do this I’ll get to that in a minute as to why they want to do this.