TOKYO, Apr 22 (AP): President Barack Obama's travels through Asia in coming days aim to reassure partners about the renewed U.S. commitment to the region, with an eye both to China's rising assertiveness and the fast-growing markets that are the center of gravity for global growth.
Nearly seven months after he cancelled an Asian tour due to the U.S. government shutdown, Obama's failure to prevent Russia from annexing Crimea has sharpened concerns that America lacks the will or wherewithal to follow through on its much-touted "pivot" to the Asia-Pacific.
The United States has been stepping up regional military deployments, but has made less progress on rebalancing through broader diplomatic and economic initiatives, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a Pacific Rim free trade agreement.
Obama arrives in Tokyo on Wednesday for the first state visit to America's closest ally in Asia by a U.S. president since Bill and Hillary Clinton came in 1996. He will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit Malaysia since Lyndon Johnson in 1966. Allies South Korea and the Philippines, the two other stops on his agenda, are also keen to shore up security ties.
U.S. allies wonder if America has adequate capability to back them up in territorial rifts with China, Caspile says, given Washington's budget problems and preoccupation with crises elsewhere.
"The American objective is to reassure countries that … America is here to stay and is going to keep a strong interest in dealing with China together with those countries," said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Tokyo's Sophia University.
Striving to allay Japan's worries over its territorial dispute with China and missile launches by North Korea, during a recent Asian tour U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel pledged two more ballistic missile defense destroyers for Japan by 2017. In a further show of solidarity, Hagel rebuked Beijing for escalating its territorial dispute with Tokyo over Japanese-controlled islands in the East China Sea that Japan calls the Senkaku islands and China calls the Diaoyu islands.
Obama's two-night stay in Tokyo - just enough for the state visit the Japanese had pushed for - in itself sends a good message, said Matake Kamiya, a professor at the National Defense Academy in Yokosuka, near Tokyo.
Getting an early start on fence-mending, Obama brought Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye together for their first face-to-face meeting since they both took office over a year ago, on the sidelines of a recent nuclear security summit in The Hague.
A visit by Abe in December to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines 14 convicted war criminals among 2.5 million war dead, irked the U.S. and angered both South Korea and China.
