Asia: Obama throws down the gauntlet to China

“Rarely has a great power been so provoked and affronted,” said Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest. China was left all but speechless by the brilliant “surprise diplomatic attack” President Obama launched during his trip to the Far East. What floored the Chinese wasn’t just that 2,500 U.S. troops will be permanently stationed in Australia’s northern port of Darwin, or that a new Asian trade group will exclude China. It was that its neighbors seem so eager to work together under America’s umbrella to scotch China’s interests: Australia is selling uranium to India, Japan is coordinating its military actions in the South China Sea with the Philippines and Vietnam, and even Myanmar is opening up to the U.S. This “reassertion of American primacy in the Pacific” leaves China facing a diplomatic dilemma: If it does nothing it loses face, but if it fights, its neighbors will cling “more closely to Uncle Sam.” The last word hasn’t been spoken in this contest, but “the U.S. has won the first round.”

Some victory, said Paul Sheehan in The Sydney Morning Herald. “One-term-wonder” Obama can talk all he wants about imposing the U.S.’s will on Asia, but in fact it’s Asia that is “shaping the United States and its future.” The U.S. is so beset by fiscal disorder and policy gridlock that it “has resorted to printing money on a historic scale,” while Asia grows by leaps and bounds. Obama’s trip does nothing to change that. What’s worse, Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s “starstruck” support of Obama’s deployment of U.S. Marines to Darwin will harm Australia’s relations with our “most important trading partner, China.” Beijing can now conclude that we have “a deep-seated commitment to American global military supremacy.”

The U.S. is not out to poison anyone’s relations with China, said Frank Ching in the Taipei, Taiwan, China Post. Obama came to offer a U.S. “security blanket to countries in the region anxious about China’s growing heft.” And if anyone doubted they needed one, consider what happened last week, at the East Asia Summit in Bali, Indonesia: Sixteen of the 18 leaders present raised the issue of maritime security in the South China Sea, which China is treating as its own territory. China had declared the topic off-limits, but when the U.S. “is around to back them up, the vast majority of countries in the region are willing to stand up to China.”

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The U.S.’s rekindled interest in Asia “has fueled strong suspicions in the region,” said Wei Jianhua in the Beijing Xinhua News Agency. This talk of “America’s Pacific century” seems completely out of step with the “mutually beneficial cooperation” that has marked Asian relations in recent years. This region doesn’t need “a country that yearns for leadership,” especially one intent on sparking disputes. If the U.S. maintains its “Cold War mentality,” it will find itself “doomed to incur repulsion” in an Asia that was doing just fine on its own.