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Obama in Asia

The elephant outside the room

Touring some of Asia’s most successful democracies, Barack Obama has a message for its most successful dictatorship

Nov 11th 2010 | DELHI, JAKARTA AND TOKYO本科

ANY American president has countless audiences to please when he takes his show on the road. For Barack Obama, on a four-country tour of Asia this week, it was hard to know which mattered most: his hosts, with whom he was trying to build closer partnerships; voters at home who had just given him a shellacking in the mid-terms; or China, the elephant outside the room, with which America more or less openly competes for influence in Asia these days.

It was chance that the tour took him to Asia’s biggest and richest democracies—South Korea and Japan were on the itinerary as hosts, respectively, of the G20 and Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summits. But that lent the tour its tacit theme: that, crudely put, the American model still trumps the Chinese one.

He started in India, where the trickiest job may have been persuading hard-up voters back home that getting closer to the Indian tiger would mean more American jobs created than are being lost to outsourcing. Mr Obama was able to flourish business deals worth $10 billion that he said would “support” some 50,000 jobs at home, notably at Boeing.

As for the bilateral partnership, India presented an unusual challenge. Mr Obama’s predecessor, George Bush, was much liked, and he himself viewed with some suspicion. But charming his hosts was easy. The earnest references to Gandhi—frugal, peace-loving, simple—drew wry smiles from India’s elite. They relish their country’s growing military clout and economic sophistication.

They did, however, like the concessions Mr Obama brought, such as a partial lifting of limits on high-tech American exports. And they loved his assertion that India is not “emerging” but “emerged”. His diplomatic gift, in a speech to a joint session of parliament, of support for a permanent Indian seat on a reformed United Nations Security Council soon traded at a discount. UN reform efforts, after all, are stalled. But the offer will embarrass China, which has quietly worked to thwart India’s ambitions for a permanent seat. China will also be vexed by Mr Obama’s encouragement of an Indian role as an East Asian power.

In comparison, Indonesia was a pushover. Mr Obama spent four happy years as a boy in the country. Now, after two cancelled visits, Indonesians still embraced him as one of their own. Mr Obama’s affection for the people of the sprawling archipelago seemed heartfelt.

Indeed, he was keen to hold Indonesia up as a model. In a speech to 6,000 cheering Indonesians, he hailed the enormous advances that the country has made, and linked it to the political system. In India Mr Obama had told parliament that the country had succeeded not in spite of but “because of democracy”. In Jakarta he made the same point about both countries. Prosperity without freedom, he argued, “is another form of poverty”.

Both speeches seemed direct rebuttals of the “Beijing consensus” in which personal liberty is sacrificed on the altar of economic growth. In both countries, too, Mr Obama lauded traditions of religious tolerance and ethnic diversity. Indonesia has more Muslims than any other country but is a land of many faiths and ethnic groups. Unsurprisingly, Indonesians lapped all this up. As one Western observer put it, the Obama visit provided “an excuse for Indonesians to relish their own myths”.

More prosaically, the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and Mr Obama signed agreements to deepen the bilateral relationship in the economic, commercial and educational realms, as well as the military one. China went unmentioned. But as South-East Asia’s giant, and a member of the G20, Indonesia is now poised to assume a much larger role in the region’s emerging security architecture, much of it aimed at coping with China’s rise and new assertiveness.

In Seoul, besides attending the G20 summit, Mr Obama continued his pan-Asian trade mission. But he failed to revive a stalled free-trade agreement with South Korea. American concerns over access for its car and beef exports went unresolved, though Mr Obama said he hoped it would be only a matter of weeks before a deal, at long last.

It had been planned that a free-trade agreement would cap a year of warming relations with South Korea. America was robust in its support after the sinking in March of the Cheonan, a South Korean corvette, allegedly by a North Korean torpedo. The failure to announce a breakthrough may have weakened Mr Obama’s message to all his hosts this week that he was committed to reviving American growth through trade.

From Seoul, President Obama flies to Japan where he will attend the APEC summit in Yokohama on November 13th and 14th and meet Naoto Kan, the prime minister. Much has changed since his state visit to Japan a year ago, when Washington pundits worried that a change of Japanese ruling parties had made America’s relationship with Japan trickier than its one with China. Not least, America’s relations with China are now decidedly tricky.

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