Has the United States adopted a new, global strategy based on the unilateral use of force that U.S. allies in Southeast Asia must either accept in total or reject at the peril of becoming a target themselves?

Or is the Bush doctrine of transforming the Middle East along US lines of democracy and private enterprise a rational response to terrorism, arms proliferation and the upheaval in the Muslim world that may take a decade or more to evolve?

Those two lines of argument have been echoing in academic and security circles across the Pacific over the past two years, and were reflected in a debate this month in Washington between Gungwu Wang, a prominent historian from Asia, and Richard Solomon, a former US diplomat and national security official.

How their respective arguments play out could have a major bearing on how the United States and Asia perceive each other in the months to come.

Professor Wang, who directs the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, was born in Indonesia and raised in Malaysia. He has written at length about the Chinese Diaspora in Asia and the more recent phenomena from his perspective of U. S. engagement with Southeast Asia.

In his opinion, the foreign policies advanced by President George W Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, represent a major break with the United States' past in Asia and present a difficult challenge to the United States' Asian allies.

Until World War II, he argued in a lecture sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, the United States was not perceived in Asia as having much of a grand strategy in the region.

Indeed, with the exception of its seizure of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, the United States was seen in rather benign terms. "In the past, the United States could always be favorably compared with the European empires," he said.

This began to change with the Cold War, Wang said, when Southeast Asia became critical to the US strategy of containment, and Washington reversed its anti-colonial stance by supporting South Vietnamese forces abandoned by the French.

Then, once the Cold War was over, Southeast Asia was seen by Washington as a "bulwark" against an expansionist China.

Yet throughout the postwar period, from 1945 until 2001, the United States was perceived as acting as part of a coalition, whether regional or global. Southeast Asian leaders "saw US policies in multiple global alliances in support of one another to maintain a peaceful world together," he said.

That all changed with Sept. 11, Wang said, when Bush promised a muscular response "in defense of American interests everywhere."

"The region now sees a major shift in emphasis that would provide absolute security to the world's one sole superpower," he explained. "It would remain the sole superpower for as long as possible, hopefully supporting a virtual empire that would last forever, and to that end, the United States would reserve the right to act unilaterally to preserve its supremacy and is less inclined to hide its iron fist in a velvet glove."

If this is so, said Wang, the choices for Southeast Asia are limited. Countries that don't accept the "self-serving" doctrine of the United States, he said, must "join with others to persuade the United States not to depend so much on military might, but return to a world where peace is won by showing respect to every country's right to live by its own values."

Solomon, the former diplomat who continues to serve in a quasi-official capacity as president of the United States Institute of Peace, took a somewhat different view than Wang.

Solomon was the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 1989 to 1992 and US ambassador to the Philippines from 1992 to 1993. Like Wang, he noted how the events of Sept. 11 had "changed everything" in US domestic politics.

When Bush was campaigning for office, for example, he made it clear in his debates with Vice President Al Gore that he detested the concept of nation-building. Yet today in Iraq, he is deeply engaged in nation-building, "although it is not called that anymore."

But Solomon argued there were continuities between Bush's policies and his predecessors that Wang may not recognize. Counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism were elements in US foreign policy before Sept. 11 but were "not part of the national debate" as they are now, he said.

Solomon also sees elements of an evolving national strategy in Bush's concept of "transforming" the Middle East and engaging the "hearts and minds" of the Muslim world.

Bush, he said, is trying to "break the impasse that led to the failure of the Oslo process and the failure of US negotiating partners (in the Middle East) to get on the road to modernization that would promote domestic reforms."

But these policies, like the Cold War policies of containment, are likely to take more than a decade to "acquire institutional reality and institutional support," Solomon said. "This is a long-term strategy to deal with terror, proliferation and the turmoil in the Muslim world."

Ten years down the road, he predicted that Asia watchers will be discussing not US, but Chinese, grand strategies.

Lanxin Wang, a China scholar at the Library of Congress in Washington, said Chinese leaders are increasingly aware of their historical role and the dangers of acting unilaterally.

Last month, he noted, Chinese President Hu Jintao invited two historians to his office to discuss the rise and fall of the great powers. "China has been the most unilateral country in the world for many decades," Lanxin Wang said. "They know it doesn't work."

Tim Shorrock is a freelance journalist based in Silver Spring, Maryland, who specializes in U.S. foreign policy in Asia, Korea, and labor issues. His writings have appeared in many publications at home and abroad.