William Fallon, notes that while Petraeus has thorough experience in a key theater, Iraq, he will have to get up to speed on new areas, including the rest of the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa.
The second category of losers would be the economies of East Asia, which the International Energy Agency says will be the main consumers of Persian Gulf oil in the years ahead.
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With the increasing severity of the security environment in East Asia, the importance of the Japan-U.S. alliance is increasing evermore.
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"With the increasing severity of the security environment in East Asia, the importance of the Japan-US alliance is increasing, " Mr Noda said.
If America pulls out of the Gulf, the nations of East Asia will either have to play a bigger military role in the Middle East, or find other sources of oil.
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The end of the Vietnam war, the industrialisation of South-East Asia and then, in the early 1990s, the closing of the naval shipyard all contributed to the demise of Philadelphia's labour-intensive manufacturing.
You think of major engagements of the United States and the dependency upon a string of bases, say, off the coast of East Asia, that is quite worrisome, and we ought to be thinking now of ways of getting around that problem.
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Katherine Tsiang, associate director of the University of Chicago's Center for the Art of East Asia, spent many years travelling around the world to locate the missing sculptures and collect 3D digital images - technology that was not available when she started the project.
Yet much of this area is well south of South Asia, big chunks of which are still north of the modern definition of East Asia.
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Its universities produce more engineers than the rest of East Asia combined, and the people they churn out still demand only a fraction of their counterparts' salaries.
In 1989-1991, Vietnam turned to the growth economies of East Asia to make up for the loss of Soviet trade and aid.
Mr Li heads the largest locally owned financial institution, the Bank of East Asia, led the election campaign for the territory's current chief executive and has better access to powerbrokers in the legislative chamber than almost any other businessman.
The lessons learned, the incompetencies unveiled, the uneasy realities revealed beneath the lofty motives of national development - all moments of home truth for the societies and administrations of the Crisis-afflicted nations of East Asia.
It would also threaten the stability of the Chinese and Hong Kong currencies, and with that the tranquility, such as it is, of the rest of East Asia.
Promoters say it is well situated for shipping raw materials from China and the Russian Far East to the rest of Asia, or Asian-made goods across the Trans-Siberian railroad to Europe.
Recognizing the key roles in the coming year of Brunei as it assumes Chair of ASEAN and the East Asia Summit, and of Indonesia as it takes up the Chair of APEC, President Obama looks forward to working closely with both countries as well as the range of partners across the region to advance energy and sustainability cooperation.
Modern currency crises the fracturing of Europe's exchange-rate mechanism in 1992, the Mexican peso crash in 1994, the collapse of East Asia's currencies in 1997, and the recent attacks on the Russian rouble are often blamed on them.
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In other words, unlike the rest of East Asia, Japan has acted as a brake on the world economy throughout the 1990s.
The idea of embedding the growing powers of Asia, Russia, and the Middle East in the kind of new liberal order favored by people like Fareed Zakaria is, for Kagan, a hopeless dream.
Indeed, since China began to flex its military muscles, declaring sovereignty over the many rocks, reefs and resources of the South China Sea, some of the countries of South-East Asia have been readier to open up their ports and repair yards to visiting American naval ships.
The Leaders agreed to meet again in 2011 at the time of the 6th East Asia Summit to take place in Indonesia.
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Peoples of the Middle East and of Central Asia are now awakening.
This week that optimism became harder to sustain, as it emerged that two of the country's biggest banks are facing serious problems in the aftermath of East Asia's financial crisis.
On the eve of South-East Asia's financial crisis of the late 1990s, the cartel met in Jakarta and agreed to increase output.
The former capital of the Byzantine and East Roman empires straddles the continents of Europe and Asia.
Clinton became the first U.S. secretary of state to attend the East Asia Summit, a gathering of 10 Southeast Asian nations and other regional powers, such as China, South Korea and Japan.
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And to tell you what you already know, the UK doesn't have a huge sovereign wealth fund, of the sort they have in Norway, much of the Middle East and Asia, keen and able to make massive long-term investments in the gubbins that underpin a nation's ability to grow and create wealth.
Numerous crises, from the collapse of Europe's exchange-rate mechanism in 1992-93 to the trauma in East Asia of recent months, make this clear.
The saving surplus in East and South-East Asia is the legacy of a bust both more recent and more spectacular than the 1970s oil shocks: the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98.
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Ruben Canlas, Web Information Systems Consultant at the Asian Development Bank, Belina Capul, President of the South East Asia Pacific Audio Visual Archives Association (SEAPAVAA) and Ray Edmonson, Director of Archive Associates, Australia and a UNESCO Memory of the World Committee Member.
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