Unfortunately for both Southeast Asia and the United States, the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia has been increasingly limited to security and business matters, with educational and cultural exchanges having progressively
diminished for decades. As for ASEAN-U.S. relations, the advent of the Bush Administration saw an increase in official Washington's attention to ASEAN as an association. I expressed ASEAN's appreciation of this to President George W. Bush during an informal meeting between him and the seven ASEAN heads of government attending the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico, on 26 October 2002. I also remarked on this to Secretary Powell at the ASEAN-U.S. Post-Ministerial Conference earlier that year. The increased attention had been manifested in several ways. In May 1998, it was the U.S.' turn to host the ASEAN-U.S. dialogue. However, not wanting to,receive senior Myanmar officials in the United States, the Americans requested that they "host" the meeting in Manila, right after the senior officials meeting of the ARF that was taking place there. On the other hand, in November 2001 , not only was the dialogue hosted by the United States in Washington, D.C. the delegation leaders were engaged by Secretary Powell, Deputy
Secretary Richard Armitage and Assistant Secretary James Kelly in discussions at the State Department and by Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Adviser, in the White House. The ASEAN delegation included U Thaung
Tun, the director-general for political affairs of the Myanmar foreign ministry. All the ASEAN delegations similarly took part in the June 2005 dialogue in Washington. As Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice met with the ASEAN Foreign ministers in New York in September, reviving a practice that had been discontinued for many years.