VIDEO: Barack Obama: The first 100 daysA new Administration in Washington excites curiosity among foreigners about the priorities and world views of the incoming power elite. In parliamentary systems, the neutral civil service provides continuity, reassurance and contacts nurtured by counterpart officials throughout professional careers.
In the United States presidential system, when a different party captures the White House, the wholesale replacement of senior officials can prove particularly disruptive to established comfort levels among friends and allies as well as competitors and adversaries.
With the Obama Administration, a number of senior people have spent the past eight years in think tanks and research institutions, writing a wealth of articles and books that are now being closely scrutinised as the functional equivalent of tea leaves for gauging new directions in foreign policy.
Two concepts especially in vogue are the notions of smart power, which builds on Joseph Nye's earlier work on soft power, with Nye himself being tipped as ambassador to Japan; and a networked world order as articulated recently in Foreign Affairs by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the new director of Policy Planning at the State Department. Thus will the great intellectual breeze from Harvard and Princeton blow away the cobwebs of foreign policy accumulated during the Bush years.
President Barack Obama's instinct for using diplomacy and power as complementary instruments of foreign policy will be welcomed as a necessary corrective to the Bush administration's belief that allies were not so much proof of diplomatic strength as evidence of military weakness.
Foreign governments will eagerly look for evidence that the new Administration will indeed listen attentively to others' needs and concerns as well as voice its own preferences and requests.
Obama's first overseas visit will be to Canada on Thursday . While important symbolically, this is less critical globally than Hillary Clinton's first overseas tour as Secretary of State to East Asia, starting with Japan. She arrived there yesterday for a three-day visit.
Given the fluidity of Japanese party politics, Clinton would be well advised to meet opposition leaders too, time and protocol permitting. She describes the alliance as a cornerstone of US policy in Asia based on shared values and mutual interests. Yet Japanese public support for the alliance has been softening even while the policy elite continues to navigate between the twin shoals of entrapment by US military adventurism and abandonment by a neo-isolationist America.
Canadians share with Indians and Japanese an ideological affinity for the liberal and multilateral instincts of democratic administrations. Yet, paradoxically, in recent times the Japan-US and India-US relations have fared markedly better under Republican than Democratic administrations.
All three countries, along with Australia and others, will be keen to caution the new Administration against the folly and risks of trade protectionism.
Like Americans themselves, outsiders too have to learn to adjust expectations downwards of what Washington can deliver in today's more chaotic and less controllable world without one dominant superpower.
Obama's biggest foreign policy priorities will be Afghanistan, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the most consequential bilateral relations will be with China and possibly Russia, depending on whether Russia continues to recover or falters. Conversely, even overtly nationalistic recent Japanese leaders have been unable to deliver more robust military assistance to US-led international missions.
Sensitive to perceived slights from Japan passers (translation: Bill Clinton) and bashers alike, Tokyo will be mightily pleased that Clinton's first look at Asia begins in Japan. But she is unlikely to satisfy Japan on the emotionally hot button issue of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea. Japan would like the progress of talks with North Korea held hostage to this issue.
To most foreign Japan well-wishers, the issue has seriously distorted the pursuit of an interest based rather than an emotionally driven foreign policy. The US policy of engagement rather than confrontation with North Korea is likely to be maintained.
Japan's scepticism on engaging with the Taliban in Afghanistan coincides with India's. Both doubt the very notion of ''moderate'' Taliban. Mindful of nuclear weapons being another highly charged emotional issue in the country, Japan was a reluctant signatory to the India-US nuclear deal. Any move to a de facto acceptance of North Korea's nuclear status will surely cross a red line for Japan with deleterious consequences for both the bilateral alliance and global nonproliferation.
A resurgent Japan would have more leverage in dealings with China while redoubling its importance to the US. Regarding China, while welcoming its constructive roles in the region and globally, both India and Japan, by virtue of propinquity, have a lesser margin for error in misreading its military modernisation than America. Neither will accept a de facto Sino-US condominium as the architecture for ensuring Asian order.
On international governance reform, the US has rhetorically supported Japan's quest for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council but never proposed a concrete plan of action. It did not back the G4 campaign in 2005, which came so close to success.
The only route to action, not more talk, is of a package formula that includes both Japan and India among others.
China and the US can continue to guard their privileged status jealously and see the Security Council become increasingly irrelevant as more and more countries challenge UN authority with impunity because they no longer accept its legitimacy. The great financial crisis has forced a similar realignment of financial governance institutions already, with the G20 having been upgraded from finance ministers to heads of government on November 15 in Washington and then again on April2 in London.
Yet here it is, Japan that has been reluctant to make room for the big emerging markets of China and India.
Their rise means that Washington's Asia policy cannot simply be synonymous with its Japan policy, while their economic health offers an antidote to the made-in-USA financial crisis and the decade-long economic paralysis of Japan.
Today, no major Asian and very few global issues, from climate change to terrorism, from agricultural trade to energy security, and from poverty to pandemics, can be addressed effectively without involving all three of the Asian giants. With an ossified Security Council and a narrow G8 as historical hangovers from the last century, a leaders' level G20 is a logical and inevitable coordinating forum for steering global affairs.
Ramesh Thakur is the founding director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
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