North Korea’s claim to have tested a hydrogen bomb raises the question of how successful President Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s much-talked-about “pivot to Asia” has been. The answer, from Council of Foreign Relations fellow Joshua Kurlantzick is: not very.
Writing in Democracy Journal, Kurlantzick argues that the Obama administration has focused too much on too much on nations in mainland southeast Asia to the exclusion of Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, which are of greater strategic and economic value and that the administration has empowered military and authoritarian regimes in, especially Thailand and additionally Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia. And of course that suggests a lack of concentration on the bigger powers — China, Japan, South Korea — as well as North Korea.
Kurlantzick has extensively traveled in and frequently written on Asia, and he is by no means a political conservative, which makes his critique all the more interesting. And while he gives the administration some credit for seeking the demise of the vicious military regime in Burma (I think we can stop calling it Myanmar now), he also argues that the administration has not pushed hard enough for reform. As a presidential candidate, Clinton has sought to claim credit for the administration’s “pivot to Asia.” If you take Kurlantzick’s critique seriously, she doesn’t have much to brag about.
