U.S. Objectives in Asia

Today, President Obama leaves on a nine-day tour of Asia, where he will visit Japan, Singapore, China, and South Korea. In a new video Q&A, Douglas Paal discusses Obama’s objectives for the trip and the U.S. role in the region.
 
Paal explains that President Obama is trying to tackle bigger, long-term issues, including the financial crisis and its aftermath, nonproliferation, and climate change. “Critics will point to high rhetoric and little substance when this trip is over,” says Paal. “I think that would be a mistake. We need to measure White House accomplishments over the long-term.”

What are President Obama’s goals for his trip to Asia?

The trip to Asia allows President Obama to get into the region and speak, really for the first time, on what his priorities are. In my view, the Obama administration is playing for the long game in Asia. They’re not looking to get quick and early scores because they’re aiming to address really big problems, the top most of those being the financial crisis and its aftermath, rebalancing global economics. The second one is movement on climate change. Even though Copenhagen is coming up quickly, we’re not going to get an early solution on that and China has to have a participating role in addressing this. So it’s playing for the long time.

Then we have nonproliferation issues including Iran, North Korea, and how to deal with Afghanistan/Pakistan. So people might wonder on this trip, “Why isn’t Obama looking for deliverables?” Things he can come back with and say, “I’ve come back with this t-shirt from Beijing.” Well he’s not going to do that, he really is trying to work on bigger issues, and so critics will point to high rhetoric and little substance when this trip is over. I think that would be a mistake, I think we need to measure them more long-term. There is risk that things can go wrong between ourselves and Asia, and China in particular, between now and the hopeful day of reaping a harvest from this trip. But I think it’s a sensible starting position for the administration.

Moreover, the last administration, the Bush second administration, really did kind of neglect East Asia. And when we focused on East Asia in those years we often focused only on Asian cooperation on terrorism, and we got to be sort of deaf to the concerns of the people around the region who were dealing with a rising China in their neighborhood, who want to have a counterbalance to China in the U.S., and the U.S. also wasn’t attending to its other interests there—commercial, social, educational, and the like. And so Obama’s trying to say, “Ok, Asia, America is back. Don’t count us out, we want in. We want to be involved in Southeast Asia, we want to be engaged with China, we want to be in a strong alliance with Korea and Japan.” That’s the long-winded way of saying that the Obama administration has broad goals for this time, for this trip.


Is the United States “back” in Asia, and how so?

The United States has sort of been “out to lunch” in Asia. We refused to sign the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation with Southeast Asia, even though the Southeast Asians made this a prerequisite for greater American involvement in the region. The U.S. has got extensive economic, trade, investment, security, energy links to East Asia, but you wouldn’t know that from the public behavior of our senior most officials.

Those people spent most of their time talking about terrorism, counterterrorism—Afghanistan/Pakistan being the focal point—Iraq, or nuclear nonproliferation issues. And we didn’t handle the nuclear nonproliferation issues that well, in fact, when it came to North Korea. And North Korea’s been in a recalcitrant mood recently—that needs attention. China’s rise needs attention. Participation in the regional forums required more high-level attention.

And I think Obama’s people are saying, “America is back into these forums. We’re not out of it, we have a range of interests to advance and defend in East Asia. And we’re not going to come in there just because it’s a favor to the East Asians. We’re there for our own reasons, we’ve sort of recovered from our preoccupation with 9/11 and we’re going to be addressing our broader array of issues.” America has a strong interest in making progress.


After Japan’s recent election, how strong is the U.S.-Japan alliance?

The U.S.-Japan alliance is coming under stress because there’s a new party in power. As with any American presidential transition from one party to another the incoming people tend to want to turn over all that was achieved by the preceding party and look at it. Now turn it over like you’d turn a rock over and examine it, and sometimes you pull up some roots, and you create some troubles when you do that. That’s to be expected, people live with that every time we change parties in the White House, and we’re going to have to live with it with Japan.

Japan’s seeking a more equitable alliance in the rhetoric of the campaign and the early days of the new Democratic Party of Japan’s administration, and the Obama administration says it welcomes that, it would be glad to work with Japan to achieve it. Now that’s good rhetoric, it’s going to be a tough promise to keep when you get down to working with individuals who’ve got very different levels of preparation on the subtleties and also the big truths of the alliance relationship.

There’s some big things that you have to get right, and then there are a lot of little things like base locations, troop expenses, things like that, that you have to get right as well. And finding missions in common in the world abroad. Well, Japan’s got restraints on its military rules but it’s certainly a big contributor on foreign assistance, and the Japanese lead a host of international organizations under the UN system.

And so Japan is a big player and we have to find a way of making our alliance harness more of what Japan is doing in these other non-military areas, while working hard to get the military side right, because Japan does sit astride the rising power in the world, in terms of military capabilities, in China. Plus it has North Korea nearby just to remind everybody that even a little power can be troublesome.


What does Obama hope to accomplish in Singapore and at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit?

The Obama administration talks about how it wants to use the Singapore meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to reify what’s been decided by the G20, to get down into finer detail on how each of the countries out there can 1) avoid protectionism, 2) stimulate demand, and 3) rebalance the global trading patterns, so that more domestic consumption will drive the growth of our Asian trade partners, because the United States’ excessive consumption over the last decade will not be sustainable. That’ll probably be reflected in high language but not a lot of specific results in Singapore.

The second big event in Singapore is the first meeting between an American president and the ten members of the ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The United States president has not been able to meet with them before because of our concerns about having Burma represented in the group. The Obama administration undertook a review of Burma policy because the last twenty years of sanction and isolation have been unavailing in terms of our interests and actually have suited the interests of the Burmese regime.

So now with this review they’ve agreed that, as elsewhere under Obama, they’re going to be willing to talk to our adversaries, even if we don’t agree with them. And so we’ve started a direct dialogue with American officials and Burmese senior officials and President Obama will meet in this group of ten with the Burmese prime minister present as head of government. I’m sure there’ll be some criticism of this but it’s been rather strange for us to tell the nine countries we get along with that we won’t meet with them because there’s this tenth country we don’t like. It’s got the priorities grabbed by the wrong end.

I think that Obama’s done the right thing, 1) to review policy toward Burma, and 2) to take full advantage of his drawing power as leader of the world’s most important country, his drawing power as someone with a Southeast Asian personal background, his five years in Indonesia as a child, and his drawing power just as someone with a global personality, to try to put American back on the stage. Chinese officials live nearby and they’re there all the time. We’re far away, it’s harder to organize important trips out to the region, but we’ve got to do our share and this is a big step forward.


How important is the relationship between the United States and China for dealing with transnational threats? What are the possible sources of tension?

The centerpiece of Obama’s travels to East Asia of course will be his meetings in China. Obama has tried to set a very high-minded, long-term agenda with the Chinese and he’s worked at it in a surprisingly positive way. Our last two presidencies, Clinton and Bush, both got off to rocky starts with the Chinese, with tough rhetoric and some early incidents that took years to recover from and we never really got past negotiating niggling points on trade policy, and did not address the broad transnational agenda of recovery from the financial crisis, addressing climate change, and dealing with nonproliferation, and hot spots in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

Obama’s approach has been to break with the previous two presidencies and to establish a positive agenda. He’s worked hard to reach out to Chinese President Hu Jintao through phone calls, very substantial phone calls in fact, and a host of meetings under the G20, the UNGA, and other auspices. Now they’ll have some real sit down time together in Beijing—gives a real face to the Chinese. It also imposes a certain amount of obligation on the Chinese to be responsive to the issues we’ve asked them to be responsive to. This is a new approach for the Chinese; we don’t know how well they’re going to do at it. China’s a very inward-oriented country, it tends to do what it’s own political system wants, much as ours does. We respond first to our own concerns. Obama will try, I believe, to frame Chinese concerns and our concerns in ways that will appeal to the Chinese self-interest, and that may not always be the case.

We have tough issues down the road. China is now developing maritime powers concomitant with the growth of its economy and its need to protect its import and export lines of communication. But this is also taking China into parts of the world where we’ve been dominant and where we have other participants in the maritime trade, other navies participate. But China has unusual claims on territories in the South China Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the East China Sea, and they’re not under conformity with out understanding of the law of the sea. Things can happen as they did earlier in this year where we had a brush between our naval intelligence ships and Chinese Coast Guard and other vessels.

In space, the Bush administration took an all-or-nothing approach and China kind of responded to that with its own fairly aggressive anti-satellite program. This could be a very expensive and wasting area of competition, and we at least need to explore how to avoid it or to create mechanisms to reduce incidents that could get our two countries at odds.

And there are other things as well, our interest in political reform, religious freedom, autonomy for Tibet, and the decision of the Taiwanese people—whether they’re going to be independent or part of China or maintain an ambiguous status. We believe it’s their decision, not China’s, and that puts us at odds with the Chinese on occasion as well. We probably have different views on the role of China’s international financial institutions, although both agree there ought to be a greater role for China.

So there’s a long list of things. Whenever you have two big economies, two huge populations bumping up against each other there’s going to be a lot more than just happy music.


Why is Obama stopping in South Korea? Will he offer anything in return for Korea’s new commitment of troops to Afghanistan, or discuss the languishing bilateral free trade agreement?

I think the stop in Korea this time really represents a punctuation point to what has been a paragraph of real improvements over the last year. The Obama administration has made its contributions to improving relations with South Korea and South Korea has made a lot of contributions as well.

The big issue hanging over our relationship with Korea is the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement, known as KORUS. This agreement—the South Koreans agreed to it a little over two years ago. Their people are growing impatient not seeing the results of it. Unfortunately, it got caught up in the American Democratic primary process last year, and although the agreement is overwhelmingly advantageous to the U.S.—because of the different tariff tables that are involved, ours are very low, Korea already has the access they want, there’s are very high, we want to lower them through this agreement—we’ve gotten stuck on the question of the export of American automobiles to their market and a large number of Korean automobiles to our market.

Negotiations are taking place. I think they’re not really negotiations to resolve the problem so much as negotiations to buy time until the mood in Congress improves toward free trade agreements and until Obama gets past his big domestic agenda on healthcare, climate change, and the like, and doesn’t want to lose any votes on side issues involving trade with Korea.

This has been a frustration for the Korean government. Despite that, the Koreans have stepped up to help in Afghanistan. They have been continuing to implement very sensitive military adjustments where there are forces in Korea will move away from the DMZ with North Korea, farther south, they’ll be consolidated. The South is paying for the new facilities, they’re paying for the housing. We’re shipping our spouses and kids of serviceman over there for the first time, and they’re building housing for them. So in lots of little ways and big ways Korea has really been a very constructive partner.

The Obama contribution to this has really been to bring South Korea into the consultation process leading up to talks with North Korea. There may or may not be talks with North Korea that go somewhere, but at least the South Koreans don’t feel like they did in the latter Bush years, that they’ve been left out or have been an afterthought. They are genuinely being consulted this time. Now Obama’s going there to reify that. I’m sure there’ll be an announcement in the next few days of a movement toward sending an envoy to North Korea to see whether the North Koreans are serious this time.

We’ve had a couple of bad experiences negotiating with North Korea. We don’t want to use force to resolve the problem. We should use diplomacy, and we should explore diplomacy whenever it’s on the table, but we shouldn’t be fools about it. We should have tough standards. The government of Lee Myung-bak in South Korea and the Obama administration seem to see eye-to-eye on setting a very high bar for success with negotiations, and even a high bar to start formal negotiations. We’ll see whether the North is ready to move forward.

This is a good basis for U.S.-South Korean relations and as an outsider I certainly hope we can get on to the free trade agreement because 1) it’s beneficial for our economy and 2) it will strengthen all those other elements of the alliance relationship I’ve just been discussing.