Asia may have little to complain about if President George W. Bush wins a second term in office despite the lack of a coherent US policy and its waning influence in the region, analysts say.
The US-led war in Iraq and global war on terror may have diverted US attention from Asia and given China greater clout in the region. But many believe Washington's relations with Asian powers have improved under Bush.
"Even though much of the world and many people in Asia are very angry at Bush and the US, the governments in Asia are pragmatic and see their interests well-served by not antagonising Bush and working with him," said Robert Sutter, visiting professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University.
"The US is by far the dominant power in Asia and Bush has improved US relations with Asia quite significantly," he said.
Sutter said it was "very rare" for the United States to enjoy good relations with both India and Pakistan, Japan and China, and Taiwan and China at the same time. "Bush has done all that," he said.
Republican Bush came into office in 2000 with a promise that he would return America's priorities to its "allies" in Asia - primarily Australia and Japan, but also Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines. Asian ties under Bill Clinton, Bush's Democrat predecessor, had a sharp focus on China.
While Bush tried to shift the attention to US allies in Asia, he was distracted by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the broader war on terrorism from late 2001.
"My feeling is that on the whole, the Asians would prefer to have Bush if the only choice is between Bush and Kerry but they would really hope against hope that Bush would reenergize his attention on Asia in a second administration," said John Tkacik, a former 23-year veteran of the US State Department.
John Kerry, Bush's Democratic rival in the November 2 elections, has spoken very little about his plans for Asia, even though he has been a key member of the Asian sub-committee of the Senate foreign relations panel for 15 years.
Tkacik, a China expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said some Asian governments were alarmed at the lack of American leadership in the region after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.
China is seen to be slowly filling the vacuum left behind by the United States in the political, economic and security spheres in the region. Beijing is also "throwing its weight around" in the region, Tkacik said, citing recent events, including alleged intrusions of Chinese vessels in Japanese waters, China's claim of an ancient kingdom which once subsumed all of North Korea and part of South Korea, and its warning to Singapore over a Taiwan visit by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong just before he took office.
"The rise of China looms over Southeast Asia and East Asia particularly as a specter of things to come if the United States is not there to provide more than moral support," Tkacik said. But Sutter said since Asia had long been reluctant to chose between the United States and China, "it would be foolish for US policy to react to China's rise by trying to compete directly with Beijing for influence in the region."
"A more effective approach would be to build on the US role as Asia's leading power and the region's economic and security partner of choice," he said.
David Brown, associate director of Asian studies at John Hopkins University, said the key failures of Bush's Asian policy were his handling of the North Korean nuclear crisis and the Taiwan dispute.
"These were the two biggest failures of things that he has actually been involved, but much of the problem is that the region has suffered from a lack of US attention," he said.