After a year or more of living too dan-gerously for their own liking, the foreign ministers of virtually all the countries of East Asia, and the United States, are converging on Jakarta for security talks early next week in the wake of this weekend's annual meeting of asean, the Association of South-East Asian Nations. Seemingly little more than a giant cocktail party and only formally established two years ago, the asean Regional Forum, as the wider gathering is called, nonetheless stands out as a diplomatic must in a region that otherwise lacks the habits of multilateral diplomacy. But already the forum is under fire for its failure to confront the main challenge to stability in East Asia: the rise of a more assertive China.
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