Washington: Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives in Asia on Monday on her first trip abroad as secretary of state for wide ranging discussions on the economic crisis, global warming and the common objective of ending North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.
Hillary's travel to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China from Monday to February 22 breaks with the tradition of first going to Europe but reflects the importance President Barack Obama's administration is placing on the role of Asia in diplomatic and global economic affairs.
"American long-term interests are deeply entwined with Asia's future. And I think that statement that she is going to that region first is a very important one to make," said Sheila Smith, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Hillary outlined a rigorous agenda for her visit in a speech to the Asia Society in New York on Friday, pledging to strengthen relations across a wide spectrum of issues and said it was an "easy choice" to pick Asia ahead of other regions for her maiden trip.
"Our capacity to solve a lot of the global challenges that we're confronting depends upon decisions that are made there," Hillary said.
Hillary wants to broaden the US relationship with China to address a host of challenges, but will also touch on thorny issues like human rights concerns and greenhouse gases while seeking Beijing's crucial support for reversing the economic downturn and pressuring North Korea.
"What we can do and the sequencing of how effective our recovery will be is very intimately connected with what the Chinese are doing and the decisions they're making," Hillary said.
Hillary's choice to include China in her first trip sends a strong signal the United States takes seriously Beijing's rise as a regional and global power, Mike Chinoy, a senior fellow at the Los Angeles-based Pacific Council on International Policy, said.
"When history books are written in 50 years, how the United States dealt with the emergence of China is going to be one of the couple themes of our era," Chinoy said.
In Japan, China and South Korea, Hillary will focus on getting the six-nation negotiations with North Korea back on track, after the talks stalled over the process of verifying Pyongyang's disclosure about the extent of its nuclear activities.
In Tokyo and Seoul, Hillary will have to deal with governments that have taken a harder line approach to North Korea and have been sceptical about the softer stance taken by former president George W Bush toward the end of his administration in order to forge a deal with Pyongyang.
The Japanese felt that the Bush administration did not do enough to push the North Koreans on the abductions of Japanese citizens, while South Korea has been concerned by menacing threats from the North, including the scrapping of a 17-year-old nonaggression pact and a warning the two sides were on the "brink of war."
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Reports of North Korea preparing for a ballistic missile test have further eroded relations in the region.
"A lot of the North Korean rhetoric and sabre-rattling, staking out extreme positions, makes the next major American move on the North Korea issue more complicated and problematic," Chinoy, the author of Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis, said.
Hillary announced Friday she intends to meet with the Japanese families of abductees to show Washington is sensitive to Tokyo's concerns.
North Korea agreed two years ago to dismantle it nuclear programme in exchange for improved diplomatic relations, economic and energy aid, and a formal peace treaty to the 1950-1953 war. Before her departure, Hillary said the United States stood by its terms in the disarmament pact accepted by Bush.
"If North Korea is genuinely prepared to completely and verifiably eliminate their nuclear weapons programme, the Obama administration will be willing to normalize bilateral relations, replace the peninsula's long-standing armistice agreements with a permanent peace treaty, and assist in meeting the energy and other economic needs of the North Korean people," Hillary said.
Hillary's comments carry extra weight because pledges made under the previous administration were viewed sceptically by Pyongyang, aware that hardline ideologues in Bush's White House opposed the State Department-led negotiations, Chinoy said.
"The new administration ought to consider giving North Korea some kind of bigger picture of what an end game would look like, things that get beyond just non-proliferation," he said.
Hillary's stop in Indonesia will place her in the Muslim world's most populous country in a trip that could foreshadow a visit later this year by Obama, who as a child attended school there while living with his mother and Indonesian stepfather.
There is speculation Obama could go to Indonesia before attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering in Singapore in November to reach out to Muslims.
"I would not be surprised if there isn't a visit arranged to Indonesia, maybe not in the next six months but at some point relatively soon," Paul Stares of the Council on Foreign Relations said.
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