United States president Barack Obama’s hopes of getting China to cooperate in addressing pressing geopolitical and economic issues of the day ran into a wall as formidable and unyielding as the historic Great Wall that he will visit on Wednesday.
Strategic analysts and observers of Obama’s interactions with president Hu Jintao in Beijing told DNA that for all the positive “spin” that both sides put on their talks, there was little substantive progress on issues that were critical to the US — the Iranian nuclear crisis, appreciation of the Chinese renminbi and climate change initiatives.
“The most charitable way of putting it is that Obama’s ‘charm offensive’ and the pre-emptive concessions he made in the hope of reciprocity failed to thaw Chinese leaders,” a Beijing-based analyst said.
For Obama, this is a “potentially disastrous foreign policy failure”, said Chinawatcher and author Gordon Chang. “He returns home with nothing.”
US officials appeared to be irascible at a media interaction immediately after Hu and Obama addressed a joint briefing at the imposing Great Hall of the People. Responding to questions about the absence of concrete takeaways from Obama’s China visit, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs snapped: “We didn’t think the waters would part and everything would change with just one visit.” Obama’s adviser for Asian affairs Jeff Bader acknowledged that the US side “did not get an answer” on Iran from the Chinese side, “nor did we expect one”.
The joint briefing by Hu and Obama was remarkable for three reasons: Obama’s public mention of Tibet for the first time in China (he acknowledged that Tibet was part of China, but urged Chinese officials to restart talks with the Dalai Lama’s representative), lack of common ground between them on many critical issues (see box) and a striking stiffness in their public manner.
Chang says there was certain inevitability to the outcome of the talks.
“Chinese leaders only wanted to entice Obama to Beijing to use him as a prop to legitimise their rule. They wanted to show the Chinese people the US president was coming to China to settle the great issues of the day. They got him to say Tibet and Taiwan are a part of China.”
Obama perhaps saw these as “gestures of friendship” to generate goodwill but the Chinese see them only as signs of weakness, reasons Chang. “Even before he left for Asia, Obama said he considered China a ‘strategic partner’. The Chinese have been waiting for a decade to hear that, and they got him to say it without lifting a finger.”
The White House probably realised that the Chinese were “not going to concede anything”. Chang says that if Obama wanted to extract Chinese cooperation, “he should have skipped China and instead gone to India… He should establish stronger ties with New Delhi.”
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