Is Asia's Golden Age Already Ending?

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2017

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you follow international affairs, it often feels like you can't go to a lecture or read an article without being told that the world's economic and military center of gravity is shifting from West to East. Michael Auslin takes a different view in his new book, The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World's Most Dynamic Region (Yale University Press, 2017). We sat down at the Tabard Inn in Washington, DC to talk about it. Auslin argues that Asia's golden age is over and the region is likely to be approaching an era of instability when it comes to economies, political systems, demographics, and war. Our conversation ranged broadly from U.S. interests in the region, the state of America's alliances, China's anxieties, and President Obama's missed opportunities. We also preview a new series on "Reclaiming Realism" and I tease a new bi-weekly podcast we have rolling out early next week called Bombshell. Have a listen!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs.
0:12.2	My name is Ryan Evans.
0:13.3	I'm the editor-in-the-rocks.
0:15.4	In this episode I sat down with Michael Ocelem to talk about his new book,
0:18.2	The End of the Asian Century, War, Stagnation,
0:20.6	and the risks to the world's most dynamic region.
0:23.0	Michael, or Misha to his friends, is a resident scholar and director of the Japan
0:27.1	Studies program at the American Enterprise Institute.
0:30.4	Before joining the American Enterprise Institute, Misha was an associate professor of history at Yale University.
0:35.0	His book is out this week and enjoy the interview. So Meisha, why did you decide to write this book? What did we need another book about
0:50.2	Asia and American strategy?
0:51.6	Well, I started with the idea that I was going to write about how America's future was increasingly an Asian one, and we had to change our DNA, so to speak, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and really take advantage
1:05.7	of what everyone was calling the Asian century and as I traveled through the region
1:10.5	to do that to do that. I started getting the other side of the story and what
1:16.7	I found was that people, whether they were in Japan or Indonesia or China or India, were
1:21.1	telling me about all the things that worried them, all the dangers that they felt were developing.
1:26.0	And so I realized as the radio, old radioinancer Paul Harvey used to say that this was the rest of the story.
1:32.0	And I wanted to try to say that this was the rest of the story and I wanted to try to capture that and
1:34.8	not to deny what Asia had done and how it had developed but that there were a whole
1:40.0	host of risks that we need to be aware of and that's ultimately what the book became.
1:45.0	I thought it was really interesting not just the way you structured the book but the way you
1:48.5	structure the analysis. You create what you call a risk map and you actually have an actual rendering of a map in the in the book and the different sort of segments of the map are failed economic reform
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from War on the Rocks, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of War on the Rocks and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.