Floundering Trans-Pacific Partnership and Obama’s inability to flex military muscle hinders ‘pivot’ with Asia

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US President Barack Obama attends the Asean summit in Vientiane, Laos. Photo: Reuters

Published: 6:03am, 9 Sep 2016Updated: 6:03am, 9 Sep 2016

With US President Barack Obama set to leave office in January after serving two four-year terms, security experts have generally appreciated his policy of a strategic “rebalance” to Asia as a way of countering the rise of China.

Citing Obama’s decision to join the East Asia Summit in 2011 and regular participation by his secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton in his first term and John Kerry in the second term, in the Asean

Regional Forum, an annual regional security meeting, they agree that his most significant legacy for Asia will be deeper and sustained engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

In historical perspective, this is probably the most deliberate and sustained engagement of Southeast Asia since the Vietnam war

Michael Green, Centre for Strategic and International Studies

“In historical perspective, this is probably the most deliberate and sustained engagement of Southeast Asia since the Vietnam war,” said Michael Green, senior vice president for Asia at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

This year alone, Obama hosted all 10 Asean leaders in California in February, visited Vietnam in May and hosted Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the White House in August before travelling to Laos this week as the first sitting US president to visit the country. Next week, Obama will host Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader and democracy icon, in Washington.

“I think the Obama administration will deserve some rightful credit for reconnecting with Southeast Asia and opening up in a sustained way an engagement strategy,” Green said, noting that Asean needed the United States and Japan as a counterbalance to China.

However some argue the US rebalance, also dubbed “pivot”, to the world’s fastest growing region is “half-measured,” given Obama’s reluctance to use military leverage as part of diplomacy and uncertainties about the fate of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending Pacific free trade deal and a major pillar of the rebalance policy, amid rising populist forces in the US election cycle.

“I say ‘half-measured’ in a sense that it has articulated a primary interest in Asia, which I think is correct, but it has not been backed up with a lot of muscle,” said Henry Nau, a professor of international affairs at the George Washington University in Washington.

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