Before his Asia trip Obama should see 2012

As US president Barack Obama prepares for his maiden visit to Asia this week, his policy advisers are sure to thrust position papers, talking point memos and speeches into his hands. He should put them aside for a couple of hours and instead go watch a movie.

Not just any film, but the disaster flick 2012, which opens internationally this week. 
In the movie, a black US president (ahem!) faces down an apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario in 2012 owing to changes on the surface of the sun.

But the cutting-edge scientific research that can save the world is being carried out not in the US but in India, by Indian physicists; the mass-transportation vehicles that can ferry humans to safety are manufactured and stockpiled in China. And in the search for ideas to deal with the prophesied catastrophe, the Obama-in-reel-life actively seeks opinions from political leaders around the world. 

For all its pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo and thrilling special effects, the central storyline strand of 2012 is the global power shift (and knowledge-shift) away from the US, which is happening in the real world.

And since no empirical fact enters human consciousness until it has seeped through into popular culture and has been caricatured by Hollywood, 2012 is perhaps the most engaging and timely executive summary about Asia’s rise that Obama can get as he packs his bag and heads east. 

Dramatic changes are sweeping across Asia, particularly east and Southeast Asia (where Obama’s upcoming travel is centred). But over the past decade, the US has been “missing in action” in this part of the world, given its preoccupations with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, more recently, the Wall Street crisis. Even given the gravity of the terrorist threats it faced, the military and economic distractions of the ‘sole remaining superpower’ meant that it was blind to the shifting of Asian tectonic plates, which have come at the cost of American influence. 

China’s rise and its emergence as the engine of economic growth in east Asia over the same period have starkly accentuated the US’s absence. The region as a whole is riding China’s growth, and collectively Asia is reinventing itself to be less dependent on exports to Western economies and become more of a powerhouse driven by domestic demand.

Even at a strategic level, staunch US allies like Japan have hinted that they cannot sit around and wait eternally for the US to show up when big things are happening closer home. But in equal measure, there is a growing trepidation within the region about the negative implications of the unchecked rise of China.

Even those who used to hector the US about its “power projection” in Asia now realise that the one thing worse than US ‘hegemony’ is a power vacuum in Asia that leaves the field open for China’s ‘hegemony’.

Last fortnight, Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew, otherwise a card-carrying member of the China Fan Club, travelled to the US and, in many speeches and meetings, including with Obama, called on America to remain engaged in Asia as a “counter-balance” to China.

(For his exertions, Lee has been branded by inflamed fellow-ethnic Chinese opinion in China as a “race traitor”.) Others like the Chinese-speaking Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd are batting for continuing US influence in the Asia-Pacific region, citing China’s “nationalist ambitions”.

As Obama will learn first-hand during his upcoming travels, there’s a renewed yearning in large parts of Asia for the US to return to being the stabilising power influence in the region.

Despite his political troubles at home, Obama remains enormously popular abroad; and as the most switched-on US president in a while, he is best placed to signal that the US is back in Asia. Not only because Asia wants it, but because it’s in America’s interest to remain engaged with Asia — and not just to avert 2012-like catastrophes.