Obama kowtows to China

On his first visit to Asia as US President, Barack Obama sounded a simple but strident message on Saturday: a conciliatory US is ready to re-engage with the Asia-Pacific region that it had neglected for some years, and will seek out “pragmatic cooperation” with rising powers, including China.

In a major policy speech in Tokyo and in other public articulations — and even in the exaggeratedly deep bow he offered Japanese emperor Akihito at the Imperial Palace — Obama signalled the end of go-it-alone US supremacism, a keenness to work at a multilateral level and a willingness to welcome China’s efforts to play a “greater role on the world stage”.

The US, Obama acknowledged, “has in recent years been disengaged” from regional multilateral organisations that could advance the security and prosperity of the region. “So let me be clear: those days have passed…”

Likewise, Obama took an exceedingly conciliatory tone with China that amounted to a ritualistic kowtow from the head of an economically enfeebled US to its ‘banker’. He held out the assurance that the US “does not seek to contain” China; he praised its contributions in promoting “security and stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan”; and he certified China as being “committed to the global nuclear non-proliferation regime” — a sentiment that’s at dissonance with the most recent Washington Post revelations about China’s clandestine transfer of enriched uranium to Pakistan.

All three of those pronouncements could have implications for India. “The George W Bush administration’s elevation of US relations with India was largely motivated by the rationale of ‘strategic hedging’ directed at China,” says David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at the George Washington University and a visiting scholar at the Beijing-based China Academy of Social Sciences. “Not everyone agreed with that rationale. The Obama administration sees the importance of building Indo-US relations on its own merits, not on a strategic ‘China card’ basis.”

Likewise, a perceived US keenness to see China take on civil defence training and infrastructure-building responsibilities in Afghanistan would undermine India’s strategic foothold there; and Obama’s certification of China’s “commitment to non-proliferation” pointedly overlooks Indian concerns about China’s record of egregious nuclear proliferation. 

Obama’s other observations on China reflected a similar desire to deepen US engagement. “It is important to pursue pragmatic cooperation with China,” he said. The US and China “will both be better off” when they meet 21st century challenges together.

“That is why we welcome China’s efforts to play a greater role on the world stage - a role in which their growing economy is joined by growing responsibility.”  Even the fleeting references that Obama made to human rights and religious freedom in the context of China were tempered by his stated interest in discussing them “in a spirit of partnership rather than rancour”.

Obama also used his policy speech to underline the need for Asian countries to contribute to the rebalancing of the global economy by relying less on US consumers and instead drive economic growth through higher consumption - and creating the space for US exports and jobs growth.