WASHINGTON - Highlighting his
much-ballyhooed "pivot" from the Greater Middle
East to the Asia- Pacific region, Barack Obama
leaves on Friday for a four-day tour to Southeast
Asia, including the first visit by a US president
to Myanmar.
The tour, which will be capped
by his attendance at the East Asia Summit (EAS) in
Cambodia, where he is expected to meet outgoing
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, comes amid high-stakes
negotiations at home with Republicans over the
dreaded "fiscal cliff", and threats that the worst
violence between Israel and the Hamas government
in the Gaza Strip in four years could escalate
into a bigger conflict.
That Obama is
leaving Washington at such a critical moment
testifies to the growing
importance his administration is placing on its
pivot - the administration prefers to call it a
"re-balancing" - towards Asia, an importance also
underlined by the fact that this will be his first
overseas trip since his re-election November 6.
"His decision to travel to Asia so soon
after his re-election speaks to the importance he
places on the region and its centrality to so many
of our national-security interests and
priorities," said Tom Donilon, Obama's national
security adviser, in a major policy address on
Thursday designed to set the stage for the trip.
"Our approach is grounded in a simple
proposition," he told an audience at the Center
for Security and International Studies (CSIS)
here. "The United States is a Pacific power whose
interests are inextricably linked with Asia's
economic, security, and political order. America's
success in the 21st century is tied to the success
of Asia."
Obama's trip, which will also
take him to Thailand, caps what seemed like an
almost-constant series of visits by top US
officials to Asia over the past several months. It
includes a joint tour this past week by Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton and Pentagon chief Leon
Panetta to Thailand and Australia, which has
agreed to host up to 2,500 US Marines at one of
its bases in the northern part of the country
closest to the South China Sea and the strategic
Straits of Malacca.
Clinton, who has been
intensively involved with the still-uncertain
reform process driven by the unlikely couple of
the president, General Thein Sein (ret), and
long-time dissident, Nobel Peace Laureate, and,
most recently, elected member of parliament, Aung
San Suu Kyi, in Myanmar for more than a year, will
join Obama when he arrives in the region.
According to the "Cable" blog on
foreignpolicy.com, Suu Kyi, who met the president
at the White House two months ago, initially
opposed Obama's visit as premature, particularly
in light of the government's failure so far to
release as many as 200 political prisoners who
remain behind bars, the ongoing violence against
the Muslim Rohingya minority in Rakhine State, and
the failure to reach a ceasefire with the
long-running Kachin ethnic insurgency.
The
transition in Myanmar - and the fact that Obama's
visit there will constitute a historic first - is
gaining the most attention in the US, with some
human rights groups and independent analysts
arguing that Washington's strong embrace of the
process - notably his decision last July to lift
the ban on US investment in the country, including
its controversial state oil and gas company - has
been too hasty.
At a rally outside the
White House Thursday, Amnesty International called
for Obama to stress human-rights concerns during
his meetings in the Yangon with Myanmar's leaders,
who will include Thein Sein and Suu Kyi.
Demonstrators said Obama, who will also be
speaking to students and civil society groups at
Yangon's university, should challenge US
corporations to "put human rights before profits"
as they invest in Myanmar's plentiful energy and
mineral resources and seek to exploit a largely
untapped market of nearly 50 million people.
Rights activists also stressed that Obama
should take up human rights issues with his other
two hosts on this trip, particularly Cambodian
Prime Minister Hun Sen, whose government has long
been accused of suppressing opposition parties and
popular movements against corruption, and impunity
for its security forces, and even Thai Prime
Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.
In a release
issued Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW)
expressed concerns about a lack of accountability
for abuses by Thai security forces, particularly
in connection with counter-insurgency efforts
against Muslim separatists in the south and about
the increasing use of prosecutions against
individuals, including activists, journalists, and
bloggers, critical of the monarchy or the
government.
"President Obama doesn't need
to tread lightly in discussing Thailand's rights
record," said Brad Adams, HRW's Asia director.
In his speech on Thursday, Donilon
insisted that Obama will deliver a consistent
message on human rights and democratic reform to
all of his hosts. But he singled out Myanmar -
which Washington officially refers to as Burma -
for special attention.
While re-affirming
the progress that has already been made, Donilon
said, Obama will also insist on the release of all
remaining political prisoners, an end to ethnic
conflicts, and access by relief workers and human
rights observers to conflict areas in the country.
But most of Donilon's remarks were devoted
to defending and elaborating on the
administration's "re-balancing" toward Asia and
the Pacific, insisting at one point that
Washington's alliances in the region "are as
strong as, or stronger than, they have ever been".
Washington's "long-term vision" of Asia,
he said was to see "a region where the rise of new
powers occurs peacefully, where the freedom to
access the sea, air, space, and cyberspace
empowers vibrant commerce; where multi-national
forums help promote shared interests; where
citizens increasingly have the ability to
influence their governments and universal human
rights are upheld".
A key element of US
strategy, he said, was "pursuing a stable and
constructive relationship with China" whose
relationship, he conceded, has "elements of both
co-operation and competition".
Although he
noted US support for Beijing's integration into
regional and global institutions, including the
EAS, which he said should be the main regional
political forum, he also stressed Washington's
determination to "move ahead with the
high-standard Trans-Pacific Partnership", an
economic initiative that has thus far excluded
China. He called it "the most significant
negotiation now underway in the global trading
system".
China has expressed growing
concern about the speed with which Washington has
been upgrading its military ties with Beijing's
neighbors, some of which - including Vietnam, the
Philippines, Japan, and South Korea - have clashed
increasingly openly with Beijing over conflicting
territorial claims in the South and East China
Seas.
Washington has also been conducting
more joint exercises with Southeast Asian nations,
including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and
Singapore, as well as Vietnam, the Philippines,
and increasing its access to ports in Singapore
and Vietnam, as well as Australia.
Even as
Beijing as expanded military-to-military exchanges
with Washington, some senior Chinese officials
have accused the administration of pursuing a
policy of "containment" and even of provoking
tensions between Beijing and its neighbors.
Last month, Washington invited Myanmar for
the first time to observe "Cobra Gold", the
world's largest multilateral military exercise, in
what US officials described as a milestone in
improved relations.
Jim Lobe's
blog on US foreign policy can be read at
http://www.lobelog.com.
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