Japan has viewed Southeast Asia from a Western perspective and people have thought they understood the region only by visiting major cities, but he presented a different viewpoint.

The US and Japan want more participants in their alliance to increase influence in the Asia-Pacific region, which reflects a Cold-War mentality.

Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere’s law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man – and who would deny him that – who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused – and still causes – the Western scale to fly heavenward.

2005 was a year of tragedy and the targeting of journalists in the Asia-Pacific region.

Japan and China is where we should focus in Asia rather than fragment by going into some of the smaller countries that might come along as acquisition opportunities,

We don't have the same concerns about a financial contagion that we saw spread once through the region of Asia and then, certainly, in Russia. This hasn't been the same type of flight to quality that the Russian situation put upon us.