THE ASIA Pacific region, stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas, boasts nearly half the world’s people, some of its most dynamic economies, and two of its most critical military strategic interfaces.
For the US, as Barack Obama is making clear on his eight-day tour, it’s where it is at. The future will be Asian. “The US is a Pacific power and we’re here to stay,” he told the 21 economies of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum. Apec met in Honolulu, on US soil for the first time in nearly two decades, and the president is now on his way to Indonesia for meetings with many of the same leaders at the East Asia Summit and the gathering of the Association of South East Asian Nations.
For the folks back home, wary of foreign adventures, his main message was about job creation. He launched a proposal for a “Trans-Pacific Partnership”, a trade pact which pointedly does not include China, and is strongly promoting bilateral deals. According to the White House, deals announced during the trip will total more than $25 billion and could support 127,000 jobs. Some, however, have been some time in the cooking, and there remains a number of regional trade issues that have not been resolved, not least the tariffs applied by China on US products and the dispute over its currency.
In the wake of a decade of heavy emphasis on Iraq and Afghanistan, secretary of state Hillary Clinton was promoting the new strategic emphasis on Asia in a major article in Foreign Policyahead of the trip. "One of the most important tasks," she writes, "of American statecraft over the next decade will ... be to lock in a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise – in the Asia-Pacific region." And countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, nervous of China's economic might and its increasing projection of military power, will welcome the US strategic "turn". In Australia, where he agreed to site a new US base, Obama made clear that defence cuts will not affect its Asian operations.
The tour has been notable not just for his refocusing on Asia, but the corollary, his tougher talking to the Chinese – in Hawaii he warned them to abide by the rules of international trade, and in Bali will criticise their more aggressively asserted, territorial claims in the South China Sea. The reality that US predominance in the Pacific is being challenged makes an adjustment in regional relationships inevitable. But signs are it will not necessarily be easy.