Obama Plays His Asia Card
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Asia offers Obama the best path for restoring faith and prosperity at home.

To the rest of the world Barack Obama represents the hope of a U.S. willing to lead the community of nations instead of bullying it. Fairly or unfairly, the tone set by his precedessor — as well as the oratorical powers that let Obama smash the world’s most visible symbol of racial barriers — has given him rock star status in a world yearning for signs that this millenium will be better than the last.

But at home Obama is mired in the spectre of 12% unemployment, a grinding health-care reform battle and a faltering U.S. mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. His once euphoric change-based oratory is now leveraged to the hilt and can’t be invested into new initiatives until his policies start bearing fruit. Having already taken for granted his success in steering the U.S. clear of panic and collapse, Americans have shifted focus to the jobless rate, monster budget deficits, mounting death toll in Afghanistan and nightmares about socialized medicine.

During the months or years it will take for Obama’s major policy initiatives to prove out his mandate can ebb as opponents juxtapose the 13-figure budget deficit with the swelling jobless rate, the escalating death toll in Afghanistan with the corrupt regime we’re shoring up in Iraq.

But Obama has an ace in the hole and has begun playing it with verve and conviction. You might call it his Asia card, and it’s one he has been counting on since taking office. It takes the form of his Asia trip which began in Japan Thursday, continued to Singapore for the important Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC), then on to China Monday and will end in Korea on Thursday and Friday.

Obama began by styling himself America’s first Pacific President and pointed out his childhood in Indonesia, his youth in Hawaii and even a town in Japan that shares the same romanized name. At APEC he showed his ease mingling on a first-name basis with Hu Jintao, Yukio Hatoyama, Lee Myung-bak and all the other leaders of Asia and Pacific. In Shanghai he held a town hall in which he managed to extend a hand to young Chinese while indirectly chiding their elders for not opening up their society to a free press. Oba-Mao T-shirts bearing Obama’s likeness in Mao-style cap and jacket attest to the personal connection that street-level Chinese feel with a man who has made the U.S. seem less of a threat and more of a friend.

The reality is that at this juncture the most important thing Obama can do for the U.S. and the world is to increase the sum total of optimism and a sense that the world is inherently a benign place while decreasing anxiety levels among our most important trading partners. An Asia that feels good toward the U.S. will be more likely to buy our products, our treasuries and our vision of a safe, clean and open world. That will translate to more credit, more business, more bright foreign students and more sense of pride and optimism among our own young people — all the things we need to come roaring back from a mess created by mistrust, venality and deep anxiety.

11/16/2009, 6:30 AM