Obama’s Road to Myanmar Is Paved With New Asia Intentions

American flags were being sewn at a roadside shop in Yangon, Myanmar, on Friday before President Obama’s arrival. 

By PETER BAKER and JANE PERLEZ

Published: November 17, 2012 

WASHINGTON — On the stump this fall, President Obama boasted that he had “brought more trade cases against China” than his predecessor had. In an ad, he asserted that his challenger “never stood up to China.” During a debate, Mr. Obama said he expanded trade with other Asian nations “so that China starts feeling more pressure” to play by the rules.

 

The contest with Mitt Romney is over, but the contest with China is only gathering steam. After a political campaign spent talking about how tough he was with Beijing, the newly re-elected president departed for Asia on Saturday for his first postelection overseas trip, a whirlwind swing through China’s backyard that is fraught with geopolitical implications.

Mr. Obama will make a historic visit to Myanmar to mark the emergence of the long-isolated country and encourage its migration from China’s orbit toward a more democratic future with the West. He will also stop in Thailand, America’s longtime ally in the region as well as a friend of China’s. And he will fly to Cambodia for a summit meeting of a Southeast Asian organization as the United States tries to increase its influence in that part of the region.

With the election over, the White House has softened its language, and presents the trip not as an explicit attempt to contain China but as the next stage of its so-called pivot to Asia, reorienting American foreign policy after a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan toward the economic and political future of the Pacific. On the cusp of a second term, Mr. Obama sees such a shift as a mission for the next four years and a possible legacy.

“The president’s trip marks the beginning of the next phase of our rebalancing effort,” Thomas E. Donilon, the president’s national security adviser, said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “When the president says the United States will play a larger and long-term role in the region, we intend to execute on that commitment.”

But when the Obama team talks about “rebalancing,” Mr. Donilon said it meant “both toward the Asia-Pacific and within the Asia-Pacific,” meaning more engagement with nations like Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia. As for China, he said, the relationship “has elements of both cooperation and competition.”

The political centerpiece of the trip is the scheduled six-hour visit to Myanmar, which is considered strategic in the reorientation to Asia not only because of its location bordering China, but because its leaders have signaled their pique with China’s relentless search for natural resources and their willingness to tilt toward the West as a way of counterbalancing their imposing neighbor.

Although the trip to Yangon was scheduled to coincide with the Asian summit meeting, the symbolism of Mr. Obama’s visit — the first by a sitting United States president — has not been lost on China, a longtime patron.

In Beijing, where Xi Jinping has just been installed as the new leader in a once-in-a-decade transition, the trip is seen as part of a continuing challenge to China’s rise. The government interprets America’s attention on the region, including the deployment of more troops and battleships, as an effort to encircle China.

“The pivot is a very stupid choice,” said Jin Canrong, a professor at the School of International Studies at Renmin University in Beijing. “The United States has achieved nothing and only annoyed China. China can’t be contained.”

On China’s periphery, where its rapid military modernization and territorial claims in resource-rich seas are viewed with nervousness, Mr. Obama’s pivot is mostly welcomed. Many in the region, however, worry about whether the United States has the money and will to follow through. There is also a question over how much impact the United States can have, no matter its commitment. China has the edge in trade; every country in the region except the Philippines does more business with China than with the United States.

“That’s happened over the last five years, faster than expected,” said Peter Drysdale, head of the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research at the Australian National University. “The disparity of the scale of what’s going on with China and the region compared to the United States will grow.”

Mr. Obama’s trip follows visits to the region in recent days by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta. The president stops in Bangkok on Sunday before heading to Myanmar.

In Yangon, Mr. Obama will meet with President Thein Sein, a former general who has led Myanmar’s opening, releasing many political prisoners and freeing the long-persecuted opposition to run for seats in Parliament. The president will also meet with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate who emerged from years of house arrest to win one of those seats.

But while Mr. Obama wraps himself in the evolving success story — the United States bet that it was worth easing sanctions early on as an encouragement to reformers — some human rights activists deemed the visit a premature vanity exercise. They pointed to the continued detention of some political prisoners, a recent sectarian conflict they believe the government has done too little to stop and the Myanmar military’s war with ethnic rebels.

Among those who initially urged against the trip, activists in the United States said, was Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.

“It rewards Burma for things they’ve already been rewarded for, and it wastes enormous political capital which could have been saved up and used to reward future events,” said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, who added that Mr. Obama should now leverage the trip by insisting on tangible action like the release of remaining political prisoners.

Mr. Donilon said the trip would help “lock in this path forward” but acknowledged risks. “We’re not naïve about this,” he said. “We absolutely are aware of the dangers of backsliding. And if that takes place, we’ll respond accordingly. But this really is a moment that we didn’t want to miss.”

In Myanmar, the visit is seen as a validation of the move from military rule. “Obama’s visit is the first after he was re-elected,” said Htay Oo, vice chairman of the governing Union Solidarity and Development Party. “It means he takes our country seriously.” But he stressed that change was coming from within, not from the United States.

The visit represents a shock to China, which considers Myanmar strategically important because of its access to the Indian Ocean, making it a shortcut for oil deliveries from the Middle East. But privately, some Chinese analysts said China overplayed its hand in tapping Myanmar’s natural resources, citing as an example a backlash against a $3.6 billion hydroelectric dam at Myitsone — a project that was suspended last year amid outrage that 90 percent of its electricity was destined for China, not power-poor Myanmar.

“People make a link in their minds between Chinese investment and previous military rule,” said Yan Myo Thein, a former student activist who writes on politics in Myanmar’s media.

For Mr. Obama, the test in the next few days will be to persuade China’s Asian neighbors that the United States is their partner and, despite doubts, staying in the region for the long haul.

“Despite the current U.S. administration’s bold rhetoric, America will in all probability look increasingly inward, as it has historically been prone to do after major wars,” Bilahari Kausikan, the permanent secretary at Singapore’s Foreign Ministry, told a conference in San Francisco last month. “A period of introspection to lick the political and economic wounds is likely.”

Peter Baker reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Beijing. Thomas Fuller contributed reporting from Yangon, Myanmar, and Wai Moe from Naypyidaw, Myanmar.

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