When Asia’s leaders gather in Honolulu next week for the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Americans will get a glimpse of the Obama administration’s hyperactive Asia agenda. While America has always been a Pacific nation, the Obama administration is now beginning to match the world’s most populous and economically dynamic region with America’s own brand of energy and leadership.

Before President Barack Obama alights on the tarmac in Honolulu, he will have prepared the way to lead anew in Asia. Among a number of significant “firsts” for our nation in the region are:

• President Obama in 2009 became the first U.S. president ever to attend a meeting with all 10 leaders of the nations that comprise the Association of South East Asian Nations.
• The United States in 2010 became the first non-ASEAN country to establish a dedicated Mission to ASEAN in Jakarta.
• Hillary Clinton was the first secretary of state in a generation to make Asia the destination of her first foreign trip.
• Secretary Clinton also launched the “Lower Mekong Initiative,” a first-of-its-kind agreement between Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and the United States to enhance cooperation in the areas of water and forest management, education, and health.

Now, President Obama will arrive in Honolulu to, among other things, attempt to get APEC nations to agree to lower tariffs on renewable energy products. He will also continue to negotiate the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama administration initiative with eight Asian nations, with the objective of shaping a broad-based regional trade pact that would include Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Look for announcements of Japanese participation and a framework for the TPP agreement to be announced alongside the APEC summit.

After the APEC summit, President Obama will travel to Bali and attend the East Asia Summit, a fairly new 18-nation security forum—becoming the first U.S. president to attend this annual meeting.

All this activity is especially dramatic following eight years of low-key engagement where Asians griped about missed meetings and America’s strategic attention was focused almost exclusively in the Middle East. But most importantly, there is a well-thought out strategy for re-engagement—a strategy based on renewing long-time allies, engaging seriously newly emerging powers with an eye on preserving stability in the Pacific, while building stronger economic ties to boost American trade, job creation, and long-term economic prosperity at home.

Our stalwart ally Japan was rocked by this year’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, and America is assisting in its recovery. Our alliance remains strong, and Japan continues to be an increasingly active U.S. partner in global affairs.

Relations with South Korea are better than they have ever been. The U.S. Congress just passed a historic free trade agreement, opening the South Korean market for a wealth of American goods. Twice in two years the Obama administration (over Chinese objections) deployed the USS George Washington to the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan to conduct exercises with South Korea in response to North Korean aggression. Last month, President Obama welcomed President Lee Myung-bak for a state visit, the first in 10 years by a South Korean president.

President Obama will visit Australia next week to announce a deepened military cooperation pact—building once again on a long-standing alliance. This follows on Secretary of State Clinton’s signing last year of the Wellington Declaration, a roadmap for deepening and expanding the bilateral relationship between the United States and New Zealand.

The Obama administration also is engaging more closely with emerging powers.

The administration in 2010 launched the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue, which has broadened and deepened relations with New Delhi to include issues from cybersecurity and terrorism to negotiations over a bilateral investment treaty and energy cooperation. Obama also launched the U.S.-Indonesia Comprehensive Partnership, including a series of agreements that will help defense and trade relations. The administration is also working carefully behind the scenes with Myanmar’s new leadership to urge liberalization there.

All of this brings us to China. The flurry of Asian activity makes sense in its own right to further U.S. economic, cultural, and strategic interests, but it is also a component of U.S. policy toward China. The Obama administration’s China policy involves increasing America’s ability to compete with China, working with China where fruitful, and pushing back when China’s actions cross the line. While the U.S.-China relationship is never easy, the administration has avoided major crises and managed to sell Taiwan the largest arm sales packages in any two-year period over the past 30 years without a major breach of relations with Beijing.

Indeed, where cooperation is possible, it is underway. A joint clean energy research center with China is now open, more U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials are based in China to monitor the safety of food and drugs coming to the U.S. market. What’s more, the Obama administration has had some significant success working with Beijing on the nuclear activities of North Korea and Iran, though it has followed a one step forward, two steps back pattern.

The U.S. needs to be engaged in Asia to ensure that China’s rise contributes to stability and prosperity in the region. In 2010, for example, when China made a series of aggressive moves related to the South China Sea, Secretary of State Clinton joined with her counterparts from Southeast Asia, including countries close to China such as Vietnam in what has been called a “showdown,” to make clear their desire for a peaceful, multilateral approach to the conflicting territorial claims there. China backed off its more forward actions and most strident rhetoric.

Similarly, the United States is creating incentives for China to conform to international law and standards. That’s why the Obama administration is negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade pact with high standards to join. The idea is build consensus in the region about a coherent set of regulations that might push China in a helpful direction. TPP rules, for example, are likely to prohibit state-owned enterprises from getting government subsidies not available to privately owned companies, an issue on which Washington has been pushing Beijing hard, with only slow progress to show for it.

These sorts of initiatives are not part of a strategy of “containment” of China, which is not possible or desirable. No Asian country would ever sign up to an anti-China alliance—each, in fact, wants to strengthen its relationship with Beijing. But at the same time, they want America to stick close by. Even if containment were possible, America benefits more from a strong, prosperous China than a weak and resentful one.

Can America afford all this Asian engagement? We have to and we will. The coming years will demand strategic choices. The next time you hear someone complaining about U.S. troops leaving Iraq, remind them that the United States is now investing more wisely and more constructively in the most important region of the world.

Nina Hachigian is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Abstract:

Since the crisis over America’s debt rating and the formation of the super committee, there has been a surge in debate about how to reduce defense spending. Despite talk of “all options being on the table,” the lack of both breadth and depth in active proposals is remarkable. Efficiency initiatives and across-the-board cuts have been advanced as solutions. However, a more extensive list of tools must be considered. To enrich the dialogue about defense cuts, what follows is an a la carte menu of options to trim DoD’s investment accounts.

Reducing carbon-dioxide emissions is primarily a political problem, rather than a technological one. This fact was well illustrated by the fate of the 2009 climate bill that barely passed the U.S. House of Representatives and never came up for a vote in the Senate. The House bill was already quite weak, containing many exceptions for agriculture and other industries, subsidies for nuclear power and increasingly long deadlines for action. In the Senate, both Republicans and Democrats from coal-dependent states sealed its fate. Getting past these senators is the key to achieving a major reduction in our emissions.

Technological challenges to reducing emissions exist, too. Most pressing is the need to develop the know-how to capture carbon dioxide on a large scale and store it underground. Such technology could reduce by 90 percent the emissions from coal- fired power stations. Some 500 of these facilities in the U.S. produce 36 percent of our CO2 emissions.

But these plants aren’t evenly spaced around the country. And therein may lie the key to addressing the political and technological challenges at the same time. If the federal government would invest in carbon capture and storage, it could go a long way toward persuading politicians in every state to sign on to emission reductions.

I’ll get to the specifics of the technology shortly. But first, consider how the costs of emission reduction fall hardest on certain parts of the country: A carbon tax levied on all major sources of released CO2, the approach favored by most of the environmental community, would make energy from coal-fired power plants cost more. To make a significant difference, such a tax would have to amount to $60 a ton.

Midwest Carbon Footprint

As a result, gasoline prices would rise 26 percent, and natural gas for household usage by 25 percent, nationwide. Rich and urbanized states could probably tolerate this. The West Coast, with its hydroelectric power, and the Northeast, which relies to a large extent on natural gas, could most easily absorb the associated increase in energy costs.

But the price of energy in the rural, Midwestern states would more than quadruple because of their large carbon footprint. Midwesterners get most of their electricity from coal; they drive relatively long distances to get to work, shopping and entertainment; and rural homes and buildings use more energy for heating and cooling.

One carbon-tax proposal now being considered is a “cap and dividend” plan that would send the tax revenue back to all U.S. citizens equally. But that would also favor the rich states that are less dependent on driving and coal.

It would be more helpful for the coal-dependent states if the federal government would use revenue from a carbon tax to help develop the technology for carbon capture and storage.

And that brings us to the technological challenges: No plant of any size with the capacity for CCS yet exists, but it has been demonstrated to work at small scales. Three different processes for capturing the CO2 are being tested, and scaling them up for 500-megawatt or 1,000-megawatt facilities should be possible.

For two years, the Mountaineer plant in New Haven, West Virginia, has been capturing and storing a tiny amount of its CO2 -- 2 percent of it -- but plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant here have been abandoned. Because Congress has dropped any idea of imposing a tax on carbon emissions, the investment doesn’t make sense.

A large plant in Edwardsport, Indiana, was being constructed with the expensive gasification process that makes it easy to add carbon-capture facilities, but it, too, has been shelved.

China may finish its large demonstration carbon-capture plant before the U.S. gets any model up to scale. Others are planned in Europe, and a small one is operating in Germany. This plant has been unable to get permission for underground storage, so it is selling some of its CO2 to soft-drink companies and venting the rest.

Subterranean Storage

Storing captured CO2 is eminently possible, too. For 15 years, the Sleipner facility in Norway has been storing 3 percent of that country’s CO2 underneath the ocean floor, with no appreciable leakage. Algeria has a similar facility, the In Salah plant, operating in the desert.

One storage strategy under consideration in the U.S. is to inject captured CO2 into huge basalt formations off both the east and west coasts. Inside the basalt, the carbon gas would gradually turn into bicarbonate of soda.

There are other ways to dispose of carbon dioxide. It has been used for enhanced oil recovery for many decades without any danger, and has been effectively stored in depleted oil reservoirs. (The gas is dangerous only in high concentration.)

It remains uncertain how much of the captured CO2 might leak during storage. Even if this were as much as 10 percent, however, it would mean that 90 percent of it would stay underground.

As CCS technology develops, it will have to be made more efficient so that it uses less energy. As it is, the capture phase is expected to require that a power plant burn 20 percent to 25 percent more coal than it otherwise would.

The technological challenges may explain why energy companies haven’t lobbied for subsidies to develop CCS. The electric-energy sector isn’t known for innovation and risk- taking. Just look at the U.S.’s outdated power grid.

But the federal government could pay for the subsidies through a tax on carbon. Such a levy would have other advantages, too: It would raise the cost of energy to reflect the damage that burning coal and oil now do to the environment, and spur the development of renewable sources.

If states with large carbon footprints can’t accept such a tax, the CCS subsidies could be paid from the general fund. The cost to build coal-fired power plants with CCS technology is estimated to be about $5 billion to $6 billion -- about the price of a single nuclear power plant. The total price for the U.S.’s 500 large plants would be $250 billion. That’s as much as the planned modernization and expansion of our missile defense system over 10 years.

But it would slash our carbon emissions by at least 20 percent. There is no other politically possible way to cut CO2 as much, and as quickly -- in a decade or two. And devastating climate change is far more likely than a missile attack.

U.S. investment in CCS technology could also induce China and Europe to follow suit. And this would allow the world time for renewable-energy technologies to mature -- to the point where we could do away with coal burning altogether.