President Obama has begun the second half of his presidential term with a planned ten-day tour of Asia. Even beneath the haze of skepticism (from critics who accused the President of fleeing the country in the aftermath of the disastrous midterm election) and the clouds of spin (from administration staffers who sought to draw the press’s attention to Obama’s efforts to promote exports and jobs), the strategic architecture and the historical importance of the trip is striking. For an administration that has been too frequently wrong-footed at home and abroad, the trip is a much-needed boost. President Obama is in the right place with the right message at the right time.
The decision to go to Asia is one that all thinking Americans can and should support regardless of either party or ideological affiliation. East and South Asia are the places where the 21st century, for better or for worse, will most likely be shaped; economic growth, environmental progress, the destiny of democracy and success against terror are all at stake here. American objectives in this region are clear. While convincing China that its best interests are not served by a rash, Kaiser Wilhelm-like dash for supremacy in the region, the US does not want either to isolate or contain China. We want a strong, rich, open and free China in an Asia that is also strong, rich, open and free. Our destiny is inextricably linked with Asia’s; Asian success will make America stronger, richer and more secure. Asia’s failures will reverberate over here, threatening our prosperity, our security and perhaps even our survival.
The world’s two most mutually hostile nuclear states, India and Pakistan, are in Asia. The two states most likely to threaten others with nukes, North Korea and aspiring rogue nuclear power Iran, are there. The two superpowers with a billion plus people are in Asia as well. This is where the world’s fastest growing economies are. It is where the worst environmental problems exist. It is the home of the world’s largest democracy, the world’s most populous Islamic country (Indonesia — which is also among the most democratic and pluralistic of Islamic countries), and the world’s most rapidly rising non-democratic power as well. Asia holds more oil resources than any other continent; the world’s most important and most threatened trade routes lie off its shores. East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia (where American and NATO forces are fighting the Taliban) and West Asia (home among others to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and Iraq) are the theaters in the world today that most directly engage America’s vital interests and where our armed forces are most directly involved. The world’s most explosive territorial disputes are in Asia as well, with islands (and the surrounding mineral and fishery resources) bitterly disputed between countries like Russia, the two Koreas, Japan, China (both from Beijing and Taipei), and Vietnam. From the streets of Jerusalem to the beaches of Taiwan the world’s most intractable political problems are found on the Asian landmass and its surrounding seas.
Whether you view the world in terms of geopolitical security, environmental sustainability, economic growth or the march of democracy, Asia is at the center of your concerns. That is the overwhelming reality of world politics today, and that reality is what President Obama’s trip is intended to address.
During the twentieth century, Europe was the central focus of American foreign policy. That was where our biggest markets, our greatest threats, our most important allies and our biggest rivals (geopolitical and commercial) were found. Today that focus has shifted to Asia. As the years go by, more of our diplomats, more of our leaders, more of our businessmen and more of our intellectuals and thinkers will build their careers around Asia. It is entirely appropriate that the longest foreign trip of the Obama presidency so far should be in this vital part of the world.
Some question the President’s itinerary: in a ten-day trip he is skipping Pakistan and China, the two countries American policy makers and strategic planners spend most of their time thinking about. To the paranoids in Islamabad and Beijing (and there are plenty in both places) this will look like a deliberate American plan to ditch Pakistan and contain China. Starting in Mumbai, where terrorists linked to elements of Pakistan’s security community committed a horrifying set of murders, heightens the impression that the President is sending a message to Pakistan. Ending the trip in Japan at a time when China and Japan are openly feuding over disputed islands will be read as a signal in Beijing.
This heightens the risks, but sometimes it is good to be clear. President Obama’s itinerary, like the trip itself, is a statement that the United States remains engaged in Asia and any attempt by one Asian country to dominate or intimidate its neighbors will find the US ready to work with those neighbors to develop an appropriate response. Those who see this President as scraping and bowing to foreign leaders and failing to assert American interests (or defend American primacy) abroad should rub their eyes and take a look. Having started the trip by criticizing Pakistan for being “too slow” to fight terrorism in Mumbai, President Obama will also have to deliver some important messages about the world economy when he visits the G-20 summit in Korea and finishes up at an Asia-Pacific security summit in Yokohama. While the President will not seek confrontation with China at these events, both his presence and his message will be a challenge.
The President made the right choice by starting his visit in India. Deepening our relationship with India is a bipartisan policy goal and it advances important strategic interests which Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, can back. President Bush deepened our relations with India; he was building on a foundation prepared by President Clinton. President Obama may have lost his majority in the House, but in India he represented the whole country. The strategic partnership the President wants to build with India is in the interests of every American.
Just because this is the right thing to do doesn’t mean it is easy. In particular, our allies in Pakistan will be watching this visit with deep displeasure, paranoid suspicion and a bitterness and in some cases a hatred which is impossible to overstate. Americans of both parties and all schools of thought need to understand that even as the United States looks for common ground between India and Pakistan and tries to tread a path that respects the vital interests of both partners, we will not make everybody happy and we are likely to pay a price.
By encouraging talks with the Taliban that don’t go through Pakistan, and by renewing President Bush’s call for a deeper relationship between the world’s two largest democracies, President Obama is confirming a significant portion of the Pakistani elite in its belief that the US is a two-faced power: a false friend. I am sure that many US officials are working to smooth ruffled Pakistani feathers. I am sure that Pakistani concerns have influenced the Obama administration’s approach to India. I am also sure that a critical mass of important Pakistanis are utterly unconvinced and will find ways of making their displeasure felt. I only hope that Pakistan will fully understand the underlying message of this trip: if Pakistan is unable or unwilling to give the US the help we need in the region, there are other powers to whom we can and indeed must turn.
At the same time, the trip comes at a time of heightened US-China tension. Last month Secretary of State Clinton stated that islands disputed by Japan and China are in fact covered under the terms of the US-Japan defense treaty. This week she is visiting Australia, where she and Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd announced a deepening of US-Australian strategic ties. (When Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister, there was much talk about how this Mandarin-speaker would bring Australia closer to China. So much for that.) Now the President is talking about our strategic relation with India. Volcanoes permitting, President Obama’s visit to Indonesia will celebrate a closer relationship with the world’s largest democracy in a predominantly Islamic country on a trip that will see him visit South Korea and Japan, both of them countries whose relations with the United States have been growing warmer of late.
People in China can read maps and read press dispatches. It is simply not possible that Beijing will ignore these facts. It is also morally certain that Pakistanis and Chinese officials will talk about their common concerns.
The Obama administration will say, and will say sincerely, that these US initiatives are in no way aimed at containing China. They are not. But they reflect a fact of life that tends to keep China contained: its Asian neighbors are in no mood to see China emerge as the regional hegemon. I have called attention several times on this blog to the rising competition between India and China. A rising China, perhaps overestimating its own strength and underestimating both the United States and its neighbors, is testing the structure of Pacific cooperation, and the response from the US and from China’s neighbors is crystal clear.
In its current mood, China is more likely to test President Obama’s resolve than to seek common ground. The approaching transition in China’s leadership makes Chinese politics more volatile; the compromise minded, often internationally educated and sophisticated bureaucrats of the Foreign Ministry are less and less able to rein in the feistier voices in the military. Many in China feel the country’s rise; many fewer understand the limits and constraints within which China must work. Their first instinct when challenged is not to give in. Challenged in one area, China can lash out in others. China’s initial response to US proposals at the G-20 was, for example, not very supportive, though there are signs that calmer counsels will prevail. One suspects that a new climate in US-Chinese relations will have many surprising ramifications as brash, inexperienced but determined Chinese leaders search around for levers they can use to shape US behavior.
The President’s participation at the G-20 economic summit in Seoul gives an opportunity to demonstrate that American diplomacy can walk and chew gum at the same time. While reaching out to the wider web of American friends and allies across Asia, the US also seeks to engage China as a partner and stakeholder in an emerging Asian order. China’s true interests, for all the bluff and bluster of some of its leaders (and ultra-nationalist voices on the increasingly feisty Chinese internet), lie in the development of an economically open and geopolitically stable Asia. America’s true goal is not to thwart and contain China but to engage with it on the vast project of Asian cooperation and development that the world so badly needs. Having eloquently demonstrated America’s determination and its wide support across Asia, President Obama will approach China in Seoul, I suspect, olive branch in hand. We shall see.
President Obama’s administration is responding appropriately to the transformation of Asia: calmly, coolly but purposefully taking steps that can help keep the Asian political situation on an even keel. Supporting the rise in Asia of political relationships and understandings that can keep that continent from exploding into destructive conflicts is a vital American interest. I hope that Republicans, however flushed with victory, and however determined they may be to return the White House to GOP control in 2012, will make sure that the world understands that the core assumptions driving President Obama’s Asian policies enjoy broad and deep backing here at home.
Many of the President’s harshest domestic critics accuse him of failing to understand, or care for, the foundations of American power. On this trip in Asia, he is reinforcing the foundations of that power even as he reasserts America’s role as guarantor of the Asian security order. Just as President Theodore Roosevelt’s dispatch of the Great White Fleet on its round-the-world tour announced that the United States was an Asian power to be reckoned with at the dawn of the twentieth century, President Obama’s progress through Asia states America’s determination to uphold the Asian order in the twenty-first. This is a bipartisan policy with deep roots in the values and the vital interests of the United States, and our friends and our rivals alike need to know that.
This trip to Asia is not the last major initiative we are likely to see from this President overseas; some of his initiatives no doubt will be wiser than others. But his approach to Asia is the right way to approach this critical theater where the 21st century will be shaped; so far this week, President Obama is doing exactly what we expect from a President of the United States.