Dr. Sutter: That’s right.
Interviewer: And you think the Obama’s administration has made any improvement and how?
Dr. Sutter: I think so. I think it has improved quite a bit. The Obama’s trade mark in foreign affairs is collaboration. He is the type of guy that wants to work with whomever he can work with to deal with salient international issues. So he deals with the Chinese, he deals with the Egyptians, he deals with Turkey, he deals with all sorts of governments seeking their help. If you are not an enemy of the United States, he is seeking help to deal with issues like the global economic crisis, like terrorism, climate change, these kinds of very broad and important topics and nuclear proliferation. So that’s, to me that’s the trademark of the Obama government and so I think he follows that approach in Asia which is I think it’s very welcomed. In other words the government is much more consultative and much less unilateral and those were big problems with the Bush administration but I think he has done a good job in shifting that, that image of the United States. Because most of the Bush problems were image problems just terrible image and he is trying to clean up Guantanamo. And he is trying to stop torture and wish he’d do a little faster but he’s trying you know and I think the effort is clear. And he is certainly paying; his administration is certainly paying some attention to Asia. Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state is very active in Asia multilateral groups and the US government is taking up a lot of initiatives. And so Obama now has agreed to join the East Asian summit. So he’s going to, that’s a big multilateral grouping in the region and he’s going to be participating in a meeting in 2011 I believe.
Interviewer: So to follow up the recent question, we have noticed Obama has employed a different approach to Asian countries but in terms of the strategic priorities do you think Obama’s administration is very distinctively different from the previous government?
Dr. Sutter: As far as Asia is concerned?
Interviewer: Yes.
Dr. Sutter: Yah, a little bit. Not too much but I think a little bit. I think in general Eastern Asia has lower priority in Obama government than in the Bush administration. In China is part of that. I think George W. Bush didn’t do a very good job in foreign relations. Most governments didn’t like him very much and most people and so he had very few people that liked him but China used to like him. And so his willingness to work with China, seemed to be he wanted to keep that relationship that was a legacy issue for him, he wanted to keep that good before he left office. Obama certainly does not want trouble with China but I don’t think it’s that important for his legacy if you see what you mean. He wants to get along with China, I’m sure he does not want to be confrontational or have a big problem with China but he’s got so much other issues. This fellow is really busy; he’s got so many things. So I think that, it’s just lower priority and even North Korea is the most salient problem in the region and even them. The Obama people don’t seem to don’t seem to be seeking after North Korea. Now North Korea detonates a nuclear weapon so it gets to the top of the priority list temporarily but then it goes down again. And I think that’s the basic pattern in the region it seems to me.
Interviewer: Thank you [IB]