East Asian states backed each other against American pressure on trans-Pacific issues.

Evidence

These differences in culture and the shifting power balance between Asia and America encouraged Asian societies to support each other in their conflicts with the United States. In 1994, for instance, virtually all Asian countries “from Australia to Malaysia to South Korea,” rallied behind Japan in its resistance to the U.S. demand for numerical targets for imports. A similar rallying simultaneously took place in favor of MFN treatment for China, with Japan’s Prime Minister Hosokawa in the lead arguing that Western human rights concepts could not be “blindly applied” to Asia, and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew warning that if it pressured China “the United States will find itself all alone in the Pacific.” In another show of solidarity, Asians, Africans, and others rallied behind the Japanese in backing reelection of the Japanese incumbent as head of the World Health Organization against the opposition of the West, and Japan promoted a South Korean to head the World Trade Organization against the American candidate, former president of Mexico Carlos Salinas. The record shows indisputably that by the 1990s on trans-Pacific issues each country in East Asia felt that it had much more in common with other East Asian countries than it had in common with the United States. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 612

Categorization

• XREF: Lee Kuan Yew’s warning echoes in current Belt-and-Road commentary on US diplomatic isolation in Asia.