Transcript
MR. JAMES STEINBERG: Good morning and welcome to Brookings. We're here to talk to you today about the upcoming APEC Summit and the bilateral meetings that will take place at and around APEC this weekend.
It's obviously quite an extraordinary conjunction of events that makes the cast of characters of APEC quite an important one right now. We've had over the last several weeks this increasing drama concerning North Korea beginning with the revelations about the Japanese abductees, and then last week about the North Korean nuclear program. We've had this horrific terrorist attack in Indonesia, obviously another part of APEC which has such profound affects on Australia, another part of APEC. And this attention to the continuing problem of terrorism and al Qaeda comes on the heels of the Summit last year at APEC which focused very heavily on the problem of terrorism.
We have in the run-up to the meeting a Summit between President Bush and Jiang Zemin and the upcoming Chinese 16th Party Congress which is expected to herald a major transition in clearly one of the key member countries of APEC.
So in many ways it seems this cast of characters who are assembling seem to be the topic dejeur and it's a very propitious time for a meeting to take place. But the question one has to ask oneself in all of this is what does APEC have to do with it, other than a forum in which these leaders from very important countries that have significant issues with the United States can come together.
There are obviously a number of economic issues on the horizon that are concerns to trans-economic situations, the questions in the region about the United States' own recovery.
What we want to do this morning is focus on the question of APEC and where it fits in the global and regional economic situation, and then more broadly on some of the political and security issues that will become the major topics of the discussion.
So we're going to begin first on the economic side. I'd like to ask Lael Brainard to begin by asking the question, how is the Bush Administration thinking about this Summit? What are their objectives? How do they think about the role of APEC? What are they going to try to get out of it?
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