President Obama leaves Monday on a weeklong trip to Asia with some unwanted baggage: Continuing questions about his administration’s commitment to the region, magnified by Republican gains in the midterm elections.
Almost three years after the announcement of a global strategy that included the well-known “pivot” to east Asia, away from a focus on Europe and the Middle East, the administration faces lingering questions about its commitment to that approach, mainly because events such as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria keep pulling its focus back westward.
Those questions have become even louder in the wake of Tuesday’s vote, in which Republicans captured enough Senate seats to take control of that chamber in January and increased their majority in the House, leaving the impression that Obama is too weakened to get his way in the last two years of his presidency.
Obama is set to visit Beijing Monday for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and a state visit with President Xi Jinping, where he is expected to again have to address concerns that the pivot is aimed at containing China’s own ambitions in the Pacific. On Wednesday he heads for the East Asia Summit and the U.S.-ASEAN summit in Burma, then to Brisbane, Australia, on Saturday for the Group of 20 summit. While in Australia, Obama will deliver a policy speech on U.S. leadership in Asia, the White House said.
In a speech Tuesday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Secretary of State John Kerry laid out the agenda for the trip, with an emphasis on the state of U.S.-China relations.
“The goal of the rebalance is not a strategic initiative to affect one nation or push people in any direction. It is an inclusive invitation to join in this march towards prosperity, dignity and stability for countries,” Kerry said. “I can reaffirm today that the Obama administration is absolutely committed to seeing through all of these goals.”
The pivot, or “rebalance,” toward east Asia was the centerpiece of the global strategy announced by Obama in January 2012 during a rare visit to the Pentagon and was designed to acknowledge the pivotal role the Pacific region plays in U.S. economic and security interests.
But the approach has been dogged from the start by concerns that it’s more theoretical than actual, in spite of assurances to the contrary by Obama and other officials, as well as tangible measures such as the shifting of military forces into the region.
A survey of Asian elites released in July by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that 79 percent supported the new U.S. approach, but 51 percent believed it was neither resourced nor implemented sufficiently.
“There is a lot of opportunity for the rebalance of the pivot to succeed, but there are problems and the president’s trip is going to be very important in terms of addressing those,” said Michael J. Green, lead author of the study and a former National Security Council staff director for Asian affairs.
Along with concerns about the U.S. commitment to the region, Obama also must overcome confusion about shifting U.S. rhetoric on what the pivot actually means.
“There is some confusion, I think, about exactly what the U.S. bottom line is,” Green said, noting that Obama’s speech in Australia is “an opportunity to lay down clearly what the strategy is, what the priorities are and what his commitment will be.”
One place where Obama’s relationship with the new Congress will play a key role is in negotiations on a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, a high priority for Asian nations, but a difficult sell with lawmakers of both parties. The deal includes 12 Pacific Rim countries, though not China. Lawmakers also are reluctant to give the president the “fast-track” authority he needs to quickly implement the deal.
Green said the administration’s plan to first negotiate then ask Congress for “fast-track” authority, though sound in the context of domestic politics, was one issue standing in the way of getting Asian partners to agree.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday that negotiators have “made important progress but there are still some important sticking points that remain. I don’t anticipate that we’ll have any announcement along these lines in the context of the president’s trip to Asia.”
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, meanwhile, also raised concerns in the region ahead of Obama’s trip when he postponed a long-planned visit later this month to Vietnam and Burma. Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said demands on Hagel’s schedule including an appearance next week before the House Armed Services Committee to testify on Iraq and Syria prompted the postponement.
“This was simply a prudent scheduling decision and nothing more,” Kirby said Tuesday. “And we absolutely have every intention of making this trip. And I would add that he called the relevant leaders, his counterparts in that part of the world, to let them know why we weren’t coming, and that we very much intend to come back.”
