President Obama went from an Election Day “shellacking” to an Asian drubbing, and American power and prestige are worse off for his ineffectual, even embarrassing, efforts.
First of all, there was the failure to close on a free trade agreement with South Korea, a key U.S. trading partner and the one of the most important Asian nations. When President Obama announced in June that the U.S. and South Korea would consummate a trade agreement in time for last week’s G-20 meeting in Seoul, he violated a cardinal rule of diplomatic negotiations: never announce a completed agreement until all of the backroom dealing is done and the parties have come to terms. President Obama’s public failure has resulted in a loss of face in Asia that only accrues to the benefit of the People’s Republic of China.
Obama’s second failure was his ill-starred attempt to get the G-20 nations to support the American proposal to limit trade imbalances. Aimed mainly at China’s massive current account surplus with the U.S., the Obama Administration sought to undo decades of global trade agreements by enforcing caps on trade. The Chinese communists used the occasion to sarcastically lecture the President about capitalism noting archly that, “The artificial setting of a numerical target cannot but remind us of the days of a planned economy.”
China deftly changed the topic from their multi-billion dollar trade surpluses to the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” policy, which China sees as a twin threat to their own undervalued currency as well as the value of their roughly one trillion in dollar-based assets. That Germany joined China in the attack on U.S. monetary policy speaks volumes of the weakness of this White House.
Lastly, Obama’s very public vow to support permanent membership on the UN Security Council for India has caused a backlash in Pakistan, the Arab world, Europe and even China. While an Indian seat on the Security Council would likely be a good thing, having the President say so publicly overseas, without a plan in place to execute it, is unwise in the extreme. (That said, it would be best to simply walk away from the deeply-flawed UN and instead create a League of Democracy where democratic India would be a member and the People’s Republic of China would not.)
On the positive side, President Obama did stand with Japan in its escalating territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku islands. The President called the U.S.-Japan alliance, “The foundation of our security and our prosperity.” While Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, “…the Japanese people as well as our neighbors recognize that the U.S. military presence is all the more important for the peace and security of this region.” True and necessary words – the trouble being that such verbal flourish has been irreparably weakened by the abysmal performance of the Obama administration during 10 days in Asia.
International affairs commentator Fareed Zakaria, once supportive of Obama’s foreign policy views, summed it up best in the pages of the Washington Post, “Two years ago Barack Obama was superman. Now he can’t do anything right.”