Obama Gets His Groove Back in Asia

The United States continues to play an influential role in the Asia Pacific, even though the president had to cancel an Asian visit amid a US government shutdown. This influence was shown in the rapid relief for the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan and dispatch of B-52s after China announced an air-defense identification zone, legal but abrupt and overlapping with air zones for Japan and South Korea, suggests Robert Manning of the Brent Scowcroft Center for International Security at the Atlantic Council. China did not consult with neighboring states. Manning describes the US influence as “foreign-policy success,” that is almost inadvertent, in that China’s assertiveness is pushing regional players toward the United States. “What is odd concerning China’s gambit is that it seems to contradict a recent trend in Chinese foreign policy,” he explains. “Beijing had been trying to walk back the perceptions of China as a rising irredentist, if not revisionist, power….” He contends that the current part-competitive, part-cooperative US-Chinese relationship is not sustainable and that the two nations must work on developing procedures for real security cooperation. – YaleGlobal