MR ROBERT Gates, the US Defence Secretary, has completed this week his first visits to China, South Korea and Japan since his appointment last December.
The new Pentagon boss is very different from Mr Donald Rumsfeld, his predecessor. While Mr Rumsfeld was abrasive and opinionated, Mr Gates is calm and unfailingly polite. And while Mr Rumsfeld always presented a list of objectives he wished to achieve during foreign trips, Mr Gates went without a fixed agenda.
China evidently appreciates this new low-key approach. On the eve of Mr Gates' arrival in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao expressed his conviction that the visit 'will help strengthen understanding and trust between the two militaries in a bid to promote a healthy development of bilateral ties'.
Mr Gates was also given the honour of a meeting with President Hu Jintao.
This does not mean military links between Washington and Beijing are flourishing. The Pentagon has continued to express its reservations about China's rising military budget, which shot up by another 17 per cent this year.
And Mr Gates demanded clarifications on specific Chinese military projects, particularly those related to space and naval forces.
Nevertheless, both sides can feel satisfied about this week's talks.
The Americans were keen to establish a permanent telephone hotline with the Chinese military to manage any future crisis.
In theory, China had long accepted the proposal. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore earlier this year, a deal appeared imminent. But progress remained slow as Chinese leaders were nervous about allowing their generals to deal with Washington directly.
Now, the hotline has become a certainty.
The Chinese, in turn, were satisfied with Mr Gates' guarantee that the US will never encourage Taiwan's independence moves.
'I restated our position that we're categorically opposed to any efforts by anyone to unilaterally change the status quo,' Mr Gates told reporters after his talks with Mr Hu. The fact that the reassurance was made in public must have been particularly pleasing to the Chinese authorities.
Compared with the China trip, Mr Gates' visits to South Korea and Japan should have been easy: both are Washington's close military allies. Yet, curiously, the agendas in both Seoul and Tokyo were less predictable, and the outcomes even fuzzier.
With presidential elections scheduled for next month, there was not much Mr Gates could decide in South Korea.
Apart from a joint communique which stated that 'the US-South Korean alliance must retain a solid defence posture to maintain peace on the peninsula and in North-east Asia', the meeting was devoid of real substance.
Mr Gates' visit to Japan was even more ill-timed. There is much to discuss, including a Japanese plan to acquire a new generation of fighter aircraft, the moving of US bases from Okinawa and plans for the creation of a missile defence system.
But the Japanese government is paralysed by the dispute with its parliamentary opposition
.
So the meeting at the Japanese Defence Ministry lasted just one hour, although the Pentagon's spokesman rushed to reassure journalists that Mr Gates and his Japanese host 'were able to cover a large bit of ground'.
Despite the media attention lavished on such events, visits by defence ministers are often not very significant; much more important are the daily contacts between individual commanders and institutions.
If the Chinese-US military hotline starts working, it will represent a milestone in bilateral relations.
Overall, then, Mr Gates' visits were merely intended to convey the message that the Pentagon is now in calmer, steadier hands. The hard work still lies ahead.
