On a wintry evening in New Hampshire sixty years ago, a respected Asian diplomat, Charles Malik of Lebanon, was prophetic: “The challenges confronting the Western world are basically three,” he asserted, “the challenge of Communism, the challenge of the Rising East, and the challenge of the internal forces of decay.”

Today, the West has seen the crumbling of the challenge of Communism. The Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites are no more. China has shed Marxism in favor of what one wag called “market Leninism.” North Korea is starving and its industry is running at about a third of capacity. Cuba’s Fidelismo has faded in its appeal to Latin Americans.

The challenge of the Rising East, however, is upon the West in full force, in culture, diplomacy, economics, politics, and military power. Ambassador Malik, later elected president of the United Nations General Assembly, said that “after centuries of relative eclipse or domination by the West, great nations throughout Asia have recently won a fine, new, free, independent existence.”

Defining Asia as the continent stretching between Japan washed by the Pacific in the east and his homeland on the shores of the Mediterranean in the west, Dr. Malik cautioned: “It is not a simple thing for the Western world to find its ultimate values energetically questioned and challenged—on the level of theory and doctrine—by more than one half of the human race.”

For America, considered the most powerful nation in the West, the challenge of the Rising East is surely among the most urgent and demanding of all the issues confronting the nation today. Going a step further, some would indeed contend that the challenge from a surging China is worth far more American attention than Afghanistan, Iraq, or even the Middle East.

The challenge of the Rising East is particularly pertinent to Hawaii as this state is America’s gateway to Asia given its geographic position, its strong ethnic ties to Asia, and the myriad of institutions that engage with Asia daily.

The East-West Center, Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Pacific Forum, Pacific and Asian Affairs Council, Japan-American Society of Hawaii, the programs focusing on Asia in the universities here, and the Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian, Japanese, and Vietnamese chambers of commerce comprise a community whose lifeblood is America’s interaction with Asia.

Nowhere will this connection be more evident than during the gathering of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum here in November when President Barack Obama will be host to the political and economic leaders of 20 other members. It may also be a nightmare for citizens going about their daily chores as the streets will likely be clogged by security measures.

The people of Honolulu will be treated to a whirl of diplomatic minuets and the tumult of political grandstanding. Even so, coursing through the billowing clouds of rhetoric will be the certainty that the fates of America and Asia are, in that overworked but fitting phrase, inextricably intertwined.

This weekly column called The Rising East will seek to illuminate events and trends in Asia and in U.S. relations with Asia that are of consequence and relevance to Americans, especially to the people of Hawaii. It is intended to inform, to stimulate debate, and sometimes even to provoke its readers, and responses of all sorts will be welcome.

Now, what of the internal forces of decay to which the diplomat Malik referred? In truth, an examination of those forces is beyond the scope of this column although the recent spectacle in Washington surrounding the vicious quarrel over the debt limit lends credence to his judgment.

Dr. Malik argued that those forces, “gnawing at the roots of freedom are in my opinion far more serious than any external danger.” He took a long view: “Whoever loves the best that the West stands and has stood for throughout its four or five thousand years of history by way of freedom and truth and justice and love and righteousness cannot be but deeply perturbed.”

He concluded with a somewhat optimistic plea to America in its association with Asia: “It is given to America to awaken and to help herself and the rest of us to a new wondrous realization….The greatest need of the moment is the authoritative articulation of what America really stands for.”

About the author: Richard Halloran, who writes the weekly column called “The Rising East,” contributes articles on Asia and U.S. relations with Asia to publications in America and Asia. His career can be divided into thirds: One third studying and reporting on Asia, another third writing about national security, and the last third on investigative reporting or general assignment. He did three tours in Asia as a correspondent, for Business Week, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and was a military correspondent for The New York Times for ten years. He is the author of Japan: Images and Realities and To Arm a Nation: Rebuilding America’s Endangered Defenses, and four other books. As a paratrooper, Halloran served in the U.S., Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. He has been awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting, the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, the U.S. Army’s Outstanding Civilian Service Medal, and Japan’s Order of the Sacred Treasure. He holds an AB from Dartmouth College in government and international relations, an MA from the University of Michigan in East Asian Studies, and had a Ford Foundation Fellowship at Columbia’s East Asia Institute.