East Asia's concern in Cold War rhetoric
East Asia is thinking about the danger of a new Cold War - with the United States and Japan on one side and China on the other. Radio Australia's foreign affairs correspondent, Graeme Dobell, covered both conferences and filed these thoughts from Kuala Lumpur.

The Cold War parallels kept popping up in the past week at the defence ministers' security summit in Singapore, and then the Asia Pacific roundtable in Kuala Lumpur.

Asia and Europe seem to be having a back-to-the-future moment. In Europe, they're worrying about confrontation with Russia, in Asia it's the open discussion of what a new Cold War between China and the US would look like.

Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, kicked if off with a scenario where US-China trade relations go sour, driven by a protectionist Congress.

The mood in Congress is hostile, he says, the Bush administration is under pressure to act tough.

The stresses are building, and if the US takes punitive measures against China on trade, China will retaliate... recrimination would build and the broader relationship would suffer, increasing the risk of what Mr Lee calls a Cold War.

Next came the new US Defence Secretary Robert Gates describing himself as an old Cold War warrior, who sees many of the principles of that epic US-Soviet struggle as being relevant today. Overcoming violent extremists, he says, will require a long sustained ideological struggle, needing strong coalitions and alliances.

Those thoughts were picked up by a Chinese colonel in the Singapore audience, who wanted to know if Cold War approaches are valid in coping with US worries about China. Dr Gates replied that one Cold War lesson was that the decades of arms control negotiations between the US and the Soviet Union, which created better understanding between the two sides about their strategic intentions. There was no such conflict now between the US and China, he said, but it showed why the US is pushing China to be more transparent about its military budget and defence plans.

Then off to Kuala Lumpur, where Malaysia's prime minister was also musing about fundamental shifts of power in Asia, the building stresses, and what he calls the lunacy of any drift to violent confrontation.

Abdullah Badawi says perhaps the best Asia can hope for is a guarded peace... as China continues to press Taiwan, a booming Asia spends ever more cash on military modernisation, and Japan, Australia and the US put more muscle into their alliance.

The back-to-the-future Cold War comments were striking in themselves. But even more so because over the last few years, the security chattering classes - in their annual gatherings in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur - have been occupied, almost obsessed, with the US war on terror and what Muslim extremism means for Southeast Asia. Those concerns are still on the table, but geopolitics seems to be back.

The problem with the Cold War model, of course, is that it doesn't really fit the way the Asia Pacific operates. In the old Cold War, the two sides were sealed off from each other economically as well as politically and militarily. This time China is reaching deep into the US economy, and not just by holding reserves of hundreds of billions of dollars of US currency

Part of the tension seems to be that this time China is adopting, not opposing, the US economic model, and doing a pretty good job. Perhaps we are in Mark Twain country, with his line that history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

And for one rhyme from the those Cold War tunes, a senior Chinese general has announced that Washington and Beijing are close to final agreement on creating a hotline, for immediate communication in times of crisis. We have been there before.

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