President Barack Obama’s recent trip across Asia was something of a whirlwind. He went to China for an important bilateral engagement with President Xi Jinping and for the multilateral trade gathering in APEC, to Myanmar to reinforce the nascent reforms that have still not taken firm hold in the country and to highlight the continuing relevance of ASEAN, and to the G20 in Australia to underscore the importance of the Asia Pacific economies in sustaining global growth. Despite the whistlestop nature of his tour, it looks like it was worth it: having left Washington beaten down and beleaguered by the recent midterm elections and by a noticeable dip in his public standing, the president returned to the nation’s capital with concrete accomplishments in hand.
The tour itself showed that the US pivot to Asia continues and is gathering pace – despite the necessary preoccupations in the Middle East, West Africa, and Ukraine. Indeed, one of the more important elements was in reminding an Asian audience that how the US fares in the rest of the world has critical implications for its long term role in Asia. Any effort to cut and run from the hard times that currently hang over the Middle East, for instance, would have negative consequences for US staying power and security commitments in Asia as a whole.
Perhaps most important on his Asian sojourn, President Obama managed to advance an ambitious and comprehensive set of initiatives with the hard-nosed President Xi. Both leaders chose to focus on building critical areas of concrete cooperation, such as in the climate arena and in taking steps to moderate military competition, rather than on merely advancing rhetorical slogans, such as “new great power relations.” By doing so, Mr Obama demonstrated that, in the current, complex phase of US-China relations, developing habits of cooperation that can build stronger bridges between the two dominant countries in the Asia Pacific region will be essential.