The Obama visit to East Asia in April marked a transition from one set of discussions in Washington, DC to another. Instead of agonizing about Japan-ROK relations, there was new thinking about the future of the Korean Peninsula, stimulated by debates in South Korea encouraged by Park Geun-hye. Rather than a narrow focus on bilateral maritime disputes in the East China and South China seas, discussion concentrated on Sino-US relations as well as Sino-Japanese relations in the broad, longer-term context of military confrontation. By the beginning of the fall, India had entered the picture through the Obama-Modi summit in Washington and as a result of Modi’s meetings with Abe and Xi. In the background were divided views of Russia’s rising interest in Asia. It is hard to recall a time when US discussions of Asia were as far-reaching as they had become in the summer of 2014, a time of greater US urgency regarding a series of conflicts in other parts of the world. Yet, the core of strategic discussions remained the US-Japan alliance, the alignment of US and South Korean thinking on North Korea, and the uncertainty of China’s policies in several directions around its borders from the Korean Peninsula to Southeast Asia. The showdown in Hong Kong was just beginning in the early fall, casting its shadow on other events.

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