President Obama once had a sound foreign-policy concept, an overarching theme with real promise of being remembered as his doctrine.
Oh, did you forget about the “pivot to Asia,” a k a “Rebalancing to the Pacific”? Well, so did he. The pivot went unmentioned in Obama’s Wednesday foreign-policy address at West Point.
Indeed, he relegated Asia’s biggest fear — the growing military threat China poses to its neighbors — to a sub-clause as he discussed the Senate’s decades-long refusal to ratify an international convention, the Law of the Sea Treaty (derided by opponents as LOST).
Oh, yes, folks on Obama’s team wag fingers at China. Over the weekend, at a meeting of regional security officials in Singapore, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel opined that China conducts “destabilizing, unilateral actions” in the region.
But what to do about it? “We can’t try to resolve problems in the South China Sea,” Obama said last week, “when we have refused to make sure that the Law of the Sea Convention is ratified by the United States Senate.”
What makes America exceptional, he added, “is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”
So American exceptionalism means playing by everyone else’s rules? This worries our Asian allies, who fear our Navy will no longer secure the Pacific as it has for half a century. As China’s aggression against Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam et al grows, all these US allies hear is Obama railing against “military solutions.”
Obama would rather confront China’s aggression by persuading President Xi Jinping to obey international law, like the good 21st-century leader he must be. After all, Beijing has ratified the prized treaty and we didn’t.
Thing is, optimism about the future of international law and institutions such as the UN has faded in recent decades.
One reason: Last month, Beijing joined Moscow in vetoing a US-backed UN resolution on Syria. Turns out Xi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin interpret international law (and 21st-century leadership) very differently than Obama. Law, they believe, is made by the powerful.
Yet the “power” dimension of the “Asia pivot” was to be a shift in US naval assets to the Pacific. But with Pentagon budget cuts, this rebalancing will likely mean only shrinking our naval presence in the Atlantic, not growing it in the Pacific. (Indeed, it may shrink there, too.)
Obama’s big concept, turns out, was an attempt to simply escape the endless wars of the Mideast and Europe, turning our attentions instead to Asia and the Pacific. There, went the thinking, nations are more concerned with commerce and economic growth than with ancient enmities. That’s where future markets are. And, yes, we can manage what Obama calls “China’s peaceful rise.”
Turns out that we can’t all that easily escape that pesky old world: The meat of Obama’s speech last week was dedicated to the Mideast, al Qaeda and Europe’s Ukraine headache.
And oops, the Pacific region isn’t all that pacified either. Notably, old enmities between Japan and China are resurfacing. Close calls like last week’s near-collision between Chinese and Japanese military planes threaten to mushroom into hot skirmishes — just as America’s refocused attentions on the region fail to materialize.
Or because of it.
Yes, Obama reassured Japan and others during his Asian swing in April that America will stand by its mutual-defense treaties. Specifically, he said, the treaty with Japan applies to the Senkaku islands, which Tokyo has administered for decades but China now aggressively covets.
But very few Asians are buying it. Why should they? As soon as Obama left the region, China planted an oil rig smack at the heart of Vietnam’s maritime commercial zone. On Tuesday, the Chinese navy sank a Vietnamese fishing boat near there. America did little to defend Vietnam beyond offering to mediate the dispute.
Some pivot. America is AWOL, so Japan is now weighing stronger military ties with Vietnam. Expect more Pacific skirmishes, and perhaps real flareups.
One world power really did pivot: Russia. With a keen eye for US weakness, Putin just signed a $400 billion deal with Xi, assuring Russia’s status as China’s chief natural-gas supplier for decades to come. Obama, by contrast, failed in his trip (and since) to complete a long-negotiated US-led treaty, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, meant to open up cross-ocean markets.
Did Obama ever truly believe in refocusing America’s attentions to the East? If so, his West Point address produced no evidence that he still does. His actions, even less so.