Obama’s Outreach to Asia
Promoting his promised strategic “pivot to Asia,” President Obama this week embarked on a tour of Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The weeklong trip is meant both to reassure allies that the U.S. supports them in territorial disputes with China and to push the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a U.S.-led trade pact that excludes China. On the first stop, Japan, Obama met with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and declared that a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea claimed by both Tokyo and Beijing “fall within the scope” of a U.S.-Japanese security treaty, meaning that the U.S. might intervene militarily if there’s a clash over the archipelago.
Obama is arriving in Asia at a tense time, said the Chicago Tribune in an editorial. China is bullying its neighbors and trying to grab new land, while North Korea appears to be readying a new nuclear missile test. The U.S. might be busy confronting Russia’s renewed aggression in Ukraine, but it’s Obama’s “task to convince Asians that our capacity and resolve” to protect our allies in the region are undiminished.
The president is all talk and no action, said Kathleen Hennessey and Christi Parsons in the Los Angeles Times. Obama announced that the U.S. would start turning to Asia, and away from its wars in the Middle East, back in 2011. But the promised redeployment of warships and troops has been “incremental, and limited by Pentagon budget cuts,” while talks over a trade deal have gone nowhere.
It’s clear that Obama raised expectations of a pivot “too high and too fast,” said BloombergView.com. But that doesn’t mean the pivot should be scrapped; it just needs to be more economic in nature. The Asian market is vital to the U.S.: We already export 50 percent more to Asia than to Europe. The administration should focus on cultivating “expertise in Asian politics, economics, and languages” across the government and American society. But that’s a long-term project that can’t be accomplished on a single presidential visit.
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