Obama’s Asia Problem

He was supposed to be on the island paradise of Bali, rubbing elbows with Asian heads of state and showing China that America is serious about being a Pacific power. Instead, on Oct. 8, Barack Obama was in the White House’s cramped briefing room, embarrassed and apologetic. Managing the shutdown of the U.S. government had forced Obama to scratch his long-planned trip to a pair of Asian summits that he’d been touting as critical venues for a display of renewed American leadership in the region. Now he was telling reporters at a White House press conference that his grounding was a setback for the country. “It creates a sense of concern on the part of other leaders,” Obama said. “It’s almost like me not showing up for my own party.”

Happy to console the disappointed heads of state in Bali was China’s President, Xi Jinping, who was the unchallenged heavyweight among the gathered Asian leaders. Xi, gloated the Hong Kong–based Communist Party newspaper Ta Kung Pao, “has become the brightest political star on the Asian diplomatic platform. In contrast, America has lost an important chance to perform … The influence of the U.S. is questioned more and more.”

A potshot, perhaps. But Obama’s no-show fueled doubts about whether America has the will and the resources to meet the challenge of a rising and potentially aggressive China. Obama officials have even given the policy for doing so a name–the “rebalance” to Asia, or as insiders call it, the Asia “pivot,” conveying a crisp turn of direction for U.S. foreign policy.

Pivoting has been easier to say than do, however. Problems like Egypt, Syria, al-Qaeda and Iran have kept Obama mired in the sands of the Middle East at a time when his team hoped to be leading the way to a new era of Pacific engagement. Obama’s planned six-day trip to the region was a chance to convince doubters with one of Obama’s most valuable commodities: face time. In the end, though, his aides concluded that the President simply couldn’t afford to be 10,000 miles from Washington at events like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit while the Tea Party had the U.S. government on lockdown. Once again, Asia would have to wait.

Panda Power

Obama didn’t talk much about China when he first ran for President in 2008. When he did, he often raised simplistic alarms about Washington’s borrowing from Beijing to finance the nation’s deficit. But early in his first term, his national-security advisers concluded that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global hunt for terrorists had distracted the U.S. from East Asia–and that China was quickly filling the vacuum. Having largely weathered the global recession and continued its rapid growth, China was codifying economic practices opposed by the West–and which the U.S. says give China an unfair advantage–like investments by state-owned enterprises that ignore human rights and environmental factors. More ominously, Beijing was making ever more assertive territorial claims in the crowded waters around its borders and intimidating its smaller neighbors.

Treating China’s rising power as an afterthought, Obama’s advisers concluded, would be a dangerous mistake. As the world’s fastest-growing region, Asia represents the future of much of the American economy. The Middle East still presents security threats, but the global order will be decided by the behavior of China and its neighbors, which include India and Russia. A peaceful and cooperative China could lead to a global boom in prosperity. An insular and hostile one could prompt a superpower competition with the U.S. not seen since the Cold War. “We came into office and tried to take a broad look at the world and ask where we were underinvested–and we were underinvested in Asia,” says Tom Donilon, who stepped down as Obama’s National Security Adviser in June. “The same time that the U.S. was overwhelmingly focused, and for good reason, on Iraq in the mid-2000s was the same time that Asia was experiencing one of the greatest economic expansions in history.”

The result was a strategy first unveiled publicly in a 2011 Foreign Policy article by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Titled “America’s Pacific Century,” the article declared that the U.S. stood “at a pivot point” as it wound down its post-9/11 conflicts, and it called for “substantially increased investment” in diplomacy, trade and military power in the region.

With the new vision came a flurry of diplomatic actions. Clinton attended every summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) during her tenure, a first for a U.S. Secretary of State, and Obama has attended three of them; his canceled trip would have included his fourth. (George W. Bush, by contrast, never attended one.) At the same time, the U.S. reaffirmed ties with nations such as Japan and Singapore that had struggled to get a call returned from Bush officials fixated on al-Qaeda and Iraq. Obama and Clinton thawed relations with long-isolated Burma and struck a deal to assist Vietnam with a civilian nuclear program. Obama’s team also cranked up its pursuit of a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal–a potentially massive pact involving 12 countries, including five Asian nations, that would create a new, NAFTA-like free-trade zone that the U.S. hopes can help draw China into a more Western-oriented trade system. Obama is so eager to pass it quickly that some business groups have warned against rushing an imperfect deal.

The pivot is about more than handshakes and free trade, however. It’s also a muscle flex. The Pentagon is deploying more aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines in the region and says it will deploy 60% of its overseas forces in Asia, up from the current 50%. Officials have said those forces will be exempt from upcoming Pentagon budget cuts. The Air Force recently announced plans to move more fighter jets to Singapore, Thailand and India, and one U.S. official said bombers could eventually be stationed in Australia. Talks are under way with the Philippines about a substantial U.S. presence there. A new force of 2,500 Marines is planned to be based on Australia’s northern coast. And in April the U.S.S. Freedom sailed into Singapore–the first of four new littoral-combat ships that will operate continuously out of the country’s Changi Naval Base. Though Washington officials play down their significance, these military moves delivered a clear message to China: Asia pivot targets Beijing, declared a 2012 headline in the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party–linked newspaper.

What alarms Beijing brings some comfort to other Asian states, which see the U.S. providing a reassuring counterweight against Chinese assertiveness, especially over its claims to contested waters and territories. The Chinese have patrolled shoals near the Philippines and arrested Vietnamese fishermen who strayed into supposed Chinese territorial waters. In March, Vietnam claimed that a Chinese ship pursued and fired on a Vietnamese fishing vessel. China has amplified its claims to a long-disputed array of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea–which Japan calls the Senkaku and China calls the Diaoyu and which are located in waters thought to be rich in oil and gas. Japan says a Chinese ship locked its fire-control radar onto a ship and a helicopter belonging to Japan’s Self-Defense Forces near the islands in January.

China isn’t the only Pacific nation picking fights: Japan and others have made aggressive maritime claims. But for many, China’s new attitude was all too neatly symbolized last year when Beijing unveiled new passports bearing a map of the People’s Republic that draws China’s borders around disputed territories from India to Southeast Asia. India’s Foreign Minister deemed the new borders “unacceptable,” and a Vietnamese official described the move as “one very poisonous step by Beijing among their thousands of malevolent actions.”

Now countries that once rejected American influence are open to it. Take the Philippines. In 1991 the former American colony shuttered the Pentagon’s largest Asian military base, at Subic Bay. Currently it is talking to Washington about a new influx of U.S. troops and naval vessels to rotate through the country “for the protection of our West Philippine Sea”–the Filipino name for part of South China Sea.

Counterweight or Cold War?

American officials and experts believe that a stronger U.S. presence can provide vital stability through a strategic balancing of powers. “We have a region where the countries clearly don’t like each other,” Gordon Chang, author and commentator, told the Aspen Security Forum in July. “Some of them want to go to war. We need to be there to maintain the peace.”

Top officials in Beijing regard the pivot as something more sinister: a containment strategy reminiscent of the one the U.S. practiced against the Soviets during the Cold War, which featured a major military buildup and efforts to pry away satellite states from the Soviet sphere of influence. China’s Defense Minister, Chang Wanquan, hinted at this view during a summer visit to Washington. “We hope the rebalancing strategy can bring peace to the Pacific region instead of seeking to weaken China,” Chang said.

The Chinese have a point. “I do not know how one reassures our allies that we are responding to China’s assertiveness and then tries to reassure China that it is not about them,” says Daniel Blumenthal, director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “China should expect a reaction to its 20-year peacetime buildup of forces. It’s very destabilizing.” After years of Chinese muscle flexing, Blumenthal argues, “We had to respond to remain credible to our allies and reassure them that we are reliable partners.”

The Obama team itself is divided on whether China represents an opportunity–a growing economic giant and lucrative trade partner–or a challenge to U.S. power and interests. In the first term, for instance, Secretary of State Clinton took a warier view of China’s intentions than did Donilon, whom one official jokingly calls a “panda hugger.” Whatever their private views, Obama officials determined to avoid Chinese hostility have worked hard to explain that the pivot is about cooperation. “We welcome China’s peaceful rise … [We] believe that a strong and prosperous China is one that can help bring stability and prosperity to the region and to the world,” Obama said before a 2012 meeting with Xi, who was then China’s Vice President. U.S. officials argue that U.S.-backed security has enabled Asia’s post–World War II boom.

And behind the scenes, top U.S. national-security officials have spent hours assuring the Chinese that the pivot has nothing in common with America’s Cold War strategy of containment, whose goal was the total collapse of the Soviet Union. “When we have these conversations with the Chinese, we make it very clear that we know what containment looks like,” Donilon says. “We know how to do it. We did it. This doesn’t look anything like it.”

To drive home the point, then Deputy Defense Secretary Michèle Flournoy visited Beijing in December 2011 to meet with the Chinese military’s then deputy chief of the general staff, General Ma Xiaotian. Ma and his colleagues had been complaining about American air and sea information-gathering missions, known as strategic-reconnaissance operations. Flournoy treated him to a short slide show that featured declassified data about equivalent surveillance missions the U.S. had conducted around the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. At the time, Soviet-oriented reconnaissance amounted to “something like 80% to 90%” of all U.S. missions, Flournoy recalls. “And we told the Chinese that if you look at the percentage today around China, it is a single-digit percentage.”

What came next was revealing. “Don’t you see the difference?” Flournoy asked her Chinese hosts, who initially nodded in understanding. “I think for a couple of minutes, I had some cognitive dissonance going,” she says with a chuckle. “Then they snapped back into, No, no, this must be disinformation–of course you’re containing us.”

Easier Said Than Done

Ultimately, what may reassure China more than any words or slides is skepticism about whether Obama’s footing is sure enough to execute a pivot. Despite his ambition to step back from Middle Eastern entanglements, the region continues to serve as the geopolitical equivalent of a screaming newborn. Obama’s foreign policy agenda has been consumed by the Arab Spring, Egypt, Syria, al-Qaeda and now Iran. His Sept. 24 address to the U.N. General Assembly was almost exclusively about the Middle East: in his more than 40-minute speech, Obama mentioned Syria, Egypt, Iran or Israel 68 times. China? Just once. His only other nod to Asia was a mention of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

“Even before the government shutdown, there was a lot of anxiety in Asia that, because of all the turmoil in the Middle East, the pivot was dying,” says a former Senate foreign policy aide who visits the region regularly.

The pivot could also suffer from the departure of some of its key architects, including Donilon and Clinton. Donilon’s replacement, Susan Rice, lacks his well-known passion for the pivot. Fixated on Syria and Arab-Israeli peace, John Kerry has traveled to the Middle East seven times as Secretary of State but to Asia just twice. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has visited the region three times, although a late-August tour was dominated by a seemingly imminent military strike on Syria, forcing Hagel to join an emergency White House meeting via video conference from Kuala Lumpur.

Restoring the pivot’s credibility will take many more visits by the likes of Kerry and Hagel. “It’s important that we keep showing up,” says Kurt Campbell, who recently served as the U.S. State Department’s top Asia hand. In his Oct. 8 news conference, Obama offered an analogy to corporate CEOs–who, he said, “if they want to close a deal, aren’t gonna do it by phone.”

China’s President certainly didn’t. In Jakarta, Xi became the first foreign leader to address the parliament of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, and announced a slew of trade deals worth more than $30 billion. In Malaysia, he spoke of better trade relations with that country and of strategic cooperation in the South China Sea.

Back home in Beijing, his government was warning the U.S. not to endanger the world economy with a debt default. At a time when America hopes to teach China about economic rules of the road, Beijing is lecturing Washington about its responsibilities. It was another embarrassing reminder for Obama that managing Asia will have to wait until he’s managed his problems at home.

–With reporting by Hannah Beech/Beijing