President Obama flew around the world to visit a giant reclining Buddha and pay a courtesy call on a hospitalized king — all to make a point.
After too many years of being obsessed with the Middle East, Mr. Obama
argues, it is time for the United States to focus on the rise of Asia.
The only problem? The Middle East is not cooperating.
Mr. Obama had not even landed here in Thailand
on Sunday before finding his four-day, three-country Asia tour shadowed
by the new crisis in Israel and Gaza. Aides have been briefing him on
the latest in the conflict, and he has been working the phones with the
leaders of Israel, Egypt and Turkey. Even his joint appearance with
Thailand’s prime minister was partly consumed by the Gaza question.
The confluence of events serve as a vivid reminder that the presidency
is an exercise in juggling priorities. But the peculiar timing also
underscores why Asia has often taken a back seat in American policy to
the more volatile areas of the world, not just under this president, but
under the past six.
The logic behind Mr. Obama’s so-called Asia pivot
draws little dispute: By many measures, it is the region of the future,
the area that will see nearly 50 percent of the world’s economic growth
outside the United States over the next five years. To compete
globally, the thinking goes, the United States will need to assert
itself as an economic and strategic power in the Pacific.
Inside the Situation Room, though, long-term logic invariably falls
victim to short-term crises, which are the specialty of places like the
Middle East.
“One of the great challenges in the implementation and execution of
foreign policy is to prevent the daily challenges, cascading crises,
from crowding out the development of broader strategies in pursuit of
the United States’ long-term interests,” Tom Donilon, the president’s
national security adviser, said in a speech before leaving Washington.
It was in service of that goal that Mr. Obama scheduled his Asia trip.
As his first overseas journey after re-election, it was meant to send a
signal that his second term would focus on moving beyond the past,
particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He visited the region
several times in his first term, but twice canceled Asia trips because
domestic issues took priority.
After a day in Thailand, Mr. Obama was to head early Monday to Myanmar
for a historic visit highlighting the emergence of that isolated
country, long known as Burma, from decades of repressive military rule.
He was to land in Yangon to meet with President Thein Sein, who has orchestrated the change, and the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
Along the way, the president planned to announce on Monday that he would
send a new mission from the United States Agency for International
Development to Myanmar and devote $170 million to aid projects over the
next two years, according to aides.
“One of the things that we can do as an international community is make
sure that the people of Burma know we’re paying attention to them, we’re
listening to them, we care about them,” Mr. Obama said in Bangkok. “And
this visit allows me to do that in a fairly dramatic fashion.”
Yet not as dramatic as Hamas lobbing rockets into Israel or Israel responding with punishing airstrikes and the threat of invasion.
Asia is not the only other region that finds it tough to compete for
attention. Mr. Obama was in Latin America when he launched the air and
naval campaign that helped topple Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya.
“There is now war between Israel and Hamas in addition to a proxy war
with Iran in Syria; there are huge demonstrations against the king in
Jordan; and the I.A.E.A. last week said Iran had doubled its capacity to
enrich uranium,” said Elliott Abrams, who was President George W.
Bush’s Middle East adviser and is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The only way to pivot away from all that is to move to Mars — Myanmar isn’t far enough.”
Moreover, even Asia is inextricably linked to events in the Middle East, said Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The reality is this — the more you pivot toward Asia, the more you have
to care about the Middle East, because Asia gets so much of its energy
from the Middle East,” he said. “Our Asia pivot doesn’t get us out of
the Middle East. It just gets us into the Middle East from the other
side.”
Mr. Obama’s advisers say they understand that. Rather than a zero-sum
game, they said, Mr. Obama must find ways to focus on Asia even as older
conflicts demand his attention. “The rebalancing doesn’t mean our
short-term military requirements in the Middle East will diminish,” said
Jeffrey A. Bader, the president’s former Asia adviser, who is now at the Brookings Institution.
Mr. Obama began his trip on Sunday with a stop in Thailand, America’s
oldest ally in Asia. Joined by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
for their final foreign trip together before she steps down, Mr. Obama
visited the Wat Pho Royal Monastery, one of the country’s most revered
cultural outposts, where both Americans took off their shoes and
inspected the famed giant reclining Buddha.
Even domestic issues followed the president, as he found himself talking about the so-called fiscal cliff back home
with a monk before asking him to pray for his success in resolving the
problem. “If a Buddhist monk is wishing me well, I’m going to take
whatever good vibes he can give me to try to deal with some challenges
back home,” Mr. Obama said lightly.
The president and Mrs. Clinton then headed to Siriraj Hospital to pay respects to King Bhumibol Adulyadej,
the 84-year-old monarch, who has been ailing. From there, they went to
the Government House for meetings and dinner with Prime Minister
Yingluck Shinawatra, who came to office in 2011, five years after her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, was deposed in a military coup.
“We have historically been an Asia-Pacific power, and I wanted to make
sure that all our friends and partners throughout the region understood
that we see this as a central region for our growth and our prosperity,”
Mr. Obama said. “It’s not one that we can neglect.”
Even if he has to keep one eye on the Middle East at the same time.
