But what happened in Thailand certainly was not the same old tired Thai military coup — ambitious ethnic Thai trying to get a leg up on the grip of the Sinio-Thai Establishment. Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire prime minister, was unseated because his globalization exploits had become just too much for his countrymen.

To make a long story short, Temasek, Singapore’s government investment fund, is on the hunt. The Island’s leadership, faced with overwhelming manufacturing competition, wants to turn itself into a financial and tourist center. Temasek, guided by the prime minister’s supposedly highly skilled technocratic wife, is chomping for regional investments.

Thaksin had managed to cozen the rural Thai electoral system with populist slogans to the consternation of Bangkok’s political class. But then Thasin cashed in his chips in an electronic combine he had put together partly with his government connections. Temasek colluded with $1.9 billion while he avoided local taxation. Thaksin had also antagonized the King, the little country’s holy of holies. And so another corrupt regime has collapsed under its own weight.

Looking round the area, international trade and capital movements are having equally profound if highly nuanced effects:

Finally, the U.S. — instead of just talking geopolitics at the Six Power meeting seeking to block WMD armaments by the rogue North Korean regime – moved in on what has been keeping it alive. Washington insisted Beijing close down a Macao bank, notorious for laundering Pyongyang’s financial linen not excluding palming off American counterfeits. Tokyo, getting no place trying to convince Beijing to help block Pyongyang’s blackmail, clamped down on notorious North Korea Japanese mafia operations — everything from thieving loan sharks exploiting local Korean ethnics to ties to Japan’s organized crime in pachinko [machine gambling] parlors. Quietly, with with the help of 16 other countries, the U.S.’ blockade of Pyongyang’s missiles and nuclear technology shipments is having some effect. Washington is transferring the burden of keeping the bankruptcy alive to Beijing. That’s why Beijing yelled when Tokyo [along with Australia and the U,.S.] in early September blacklisted 15 organizations and individuals handling Pyongyang’s deals.

The relatively minor but festering Mainland China-Taiwan problem also is succumbing to constraints of global economic pressure. Taiwan’s continuing investment — probably as much as a hundred billion — and perhaps even more important, its half million entrepreneurs living on the Mainland, are essential to China’s export-led boom. Waking up to these realities, Beijing has stopped blustering and is trying to play globalization off against Taiwan President Chen Hsui-bian who has lived off Beijing’s mistakes for years. The multinationals [aided for some peculiar reason by U.S. Dept. of Commerce] has made it clear without further integration with the Mainland’s subsidized exports, Taiwan’s economy will stagnate. And local businessmen had been the main prop for Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party [along with a fanatical “independence” fringe]. [It hasn’t helped Chen that he has an in-family influence peddling scandal.] So Chen, a lameduck with a presidential contest approaching, has caved on Beijing’s [and his business community’s] demands for direct communications and transport — for the moment at least, somewhat defusing the feud.

Other examples are multitudinous. Japan’s Prime Minister-nominee Shinzo Abe may find his first test Moscow’s threat to up the ante on Japan’s effort to use Siberian gas and oil to reduce its dependence on Mideast oil. The next South Korean president will be faced with a crisis in international investors’ confidence brought on by the antics of President Roh Moo-Huyn’s amateurish leftist corterie. India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh finds himself between a rock and a hard place with Iranian gas [against Washington’s wishes and with an implied security threat as it would cross Pakistan] as his major prop for continuing a competitive boom with China. Malaysian Prime Minsiter Abdullah Ahmad Badaw who must get on with disassemble “crony capitalism” to compete against Singapore and China is beset by his mentor and predecessor. the xenophobic Mahahtir Mohammed, playing to the Islamic “ultras”.

Even the new boy on the bloc, Sec. of Treasury Hank Paulson, was trying to play domestic politics in China, the hub of Asia’s globalization. He arrived throwing the U,.S.’ weight against the old Chinese Communist “left” fighting further economic liberalization [and its threat to the Party’s monopoly of power]. The hardlinners are emerging just in time for next year’s succession fight at the CCP’s Seventh Congress, one President Hu Jin-tao, along with so many other problems, hasn’t even begun to solve.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.