Author: Peter Drysdale

Next month Mr Obama will visit Australia for the first time as President of the United States. His schedule is still shrouded in secrecy but he is scheduled to address both houses of the Australian parliament in Canberra, following the precedents set by his predecessor, George W Bush, and President Hu Jintao of China. By any yardstick, this is among the most important events in Australia’s diplomatic calendar. Though the going might be a little rough for him at home right now, Obama is bound to be welcomed very warmly in this country.

But what is at stake on the visit? This week Hugh White reviews Australia’s relationship with America over the past few Presidents and Australian prime ministers and nails what he believes is the central question that the President and Australian Prime Minister Rudd must deal with. Read more…

Author: Hugh White, ANU

President Obama’s visit to Australia is a bit of a puzzle. The superficial politics are obvious enough, at least for Rudd. The deeper dynamics are not. That is because we do not yet know what Kevin Rudd thinks of the US alliance. Of course he supports it; every Australian leader does. But he has not so far defined what he wants to do with it.

In this he differs from his predecessors. Bob Hawke and John Howard, in very different ways, each re-conceived the alliance, to suit their own policy aims and political purposes. Read more…

Author: Wendy Dobson, University of Toronto

The central domestic challenge for America in 2010 is economic. Unemployment is above 10 per cent and probably has not yet peaked, the recovery in economic activity is anemic and the massive fiscal and monetary policy responses have yet to show that they can successfully bridge to the resumption of organic activity. The recession was unprecedented in that its causes lie in the financial sector in which there is now deep risk aversion by traditional lenders and the weak recovery risks exacerbating protectionist sentiment.

In the coming year policy makers face difficult decisions about exit: timing the withdrawal of fiscal and monetary stimulus soon enough to avoid igniting inflation but not so soon that recovery is nipped in the bud. They also face potential political firestorms over the design of a long-term strategy for fiscal consolidation (after a deficit estimated to exceed 13 per cent of GDP in 2009) and a desire by some elected representatives to hold the Federal Reserve Board accountable for the perceived laxity in monetary policy which, along with weaknesses in financial regulation, is seen to have seeded the crisis. Read more…

Author: Nina Hachigian, Center for American Progress, Washington

President Obama’s first steps in 2009 reveal a U.S. committed to reenergizing the role of the U.S. in Asia and set U.S.-Asian relations on a promising path.

Obama’s tenure began with an important symbolic gesture: The first trip that Hillary Clinton took as Secretary of State was to Asia, not Europe, where her predecessors for the last forty years had gone first. A few months later, without a great deal of fanfare, the Administration signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, which paved the way for President Obama, in November, to become the first American president to attend an ASEAN summit. This, too, was an important symbol that America would re-focus on Asia, show-up, and take Asia’s regional institutions seriously.

In terms of America’s treaty allies, Japan’s elections were momentous, and while U.S.-Japan relations under the new DJP government have not been entirely smooth sailing, these are still early days, and in time they are likely to work themselves out. Read more…

Author: Xue Chen, SIIS

Although some in the media try to interpret the length of President Obama’s stay in China on his inaugural trip to Asia as a sign of the strength of US-China bilateral ties, the public opinion polls within China reveal a somewhat different perspective.

Global Times, China’s leading news website in English, found in an online poll that 86 per cent of the 8,100 respondents said they either ‘do not anticipate’ or ‘do not care much’ about the coming visit of the US President. Read more…

Author: Peter Drysdale

President Barack Obama’s visit to Singapore to participate in APEC was preceded by a stopover in Japan and will be followed by visits to China and Korea over the coming few days— his first visit to Asia since assuming the Presidency. He comes to a region that extends him much goodwill and one where, despite America’s diminished international standing over the last decade, he has lifted American stocks with the promise of a more consultative, multilateral diplomacy and the engagement with America that the region still values highly for a range of very different reasons. In a series of pieces (by Funabashi Yoichi, Bill Tow and others below) this week we examine the impact of the Obama visit on America’s relations with Asia and her major Asian allies and partners. Read more…

Author: Hugh White, ANU

No relationship in the world is more important than the US-China relationship. None is changing faster. And none is less clear in its long-term trajectory.

So it’s a strange and telling fact that Barack Obama has so far said nothing substantive about it, either as candidate or President. That makes this weekend’s visit to China an important event Read more…

Author: Bill Tow, ANU

Embarking on his first trip to Asia as President, Barack Obama returns to a region where he spent a portion of his childhood and where his popularity remains high despite his worsening political standing at home.

Obama confronts a landmark decision on intensifying the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan, America’s unemployment rate, and the likely defeat of his health care package in the U.S. Senate. One might conclude that his nine-day Asian tour constitutes a sentimental journey back to the early days of his presidency when it seemed his own country and most of the world was at his feet. Nothing could be more deceptive. Read more…

Author: Aurelia George Mulgan

At the heart of the US-Japan alliance has always been a grand bargain. The United States has provided defence protection for Japan under Article 5 of the Mutual Security Treaty, while Japan has provided bases for the US military under Article 6. Although not strictly under any treaty obligations, Japan has made greater military commitments to the alliance both regionally and internationally in order to compensate for the imbalance in security burdens.

The new Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) government led by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is tampering with this grand bargain. Read more…

Author: Funabashi Yoichi, Asahi

With U.S. President Barack Obama scheduled to arrive Friday for a two-day visit, Tokyo and Washington are still fumbling to get on the same wavelength.

Although Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has repeatedly stressed that his government’s diplomacy would be centered on the alliance with the United States, many in the Obama camp have their doubts. Read more…

Author: Takashi Shirashi, GRIPS and IDE-JETRO

Since the Democratic Party of Japan came to power with Yukio Hatoyama as prime minister, its foreign policy — above all its positions on the Japan-U.S. alliance and the East Asian community building — has come under a spate of criticism at home and abroad.

Critics argue that it is contradictory to call for the building of an East Asian community while pledging to maintain the Japan-U.S. alliance as the cornerstone of Japan’s foreign policy. Read more…

Author: Joel Rathus, Adelaide University and Meiji University

At the fourth East Asian Summit, held on 25 October in Thailand, the leaders of Japan and Australia had the opportunity to air their ideas about the future form and function of East Asian regionalism.

As Acharya notes Australian PM Rudd and Japanese PM Hatoyama appear to have competing visions about how to re-order the region. But, at this stage, if only because both proposals share a level of deliberately in-built vagueness, it’s not easy to tell. Hatoyama, for example, seems ambivalent – or at least unsure – on what role the US ought to play in the region. Read more…

Author: William Tow, ANU & ASI

The newly elected government of Japan has already released its vision of how a regional community-building process could be pursued.

Yet Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been vigorously promoting his own vision of a regional architecture for the past eighteen months. The Australian leader could caution the Hatoyama government on the dangers of going too far, too fast in promoting any one grand vision for regional order-building. Read more…

Author: Hugh White, ANU

When the Berlin Wall fell it seemed to many that the end of the Cold War marked not just the end of a particular geostrategic episode, but the end of geostrategy as such. Now geostrategy is back. We are again exploring how the international order — the set of understandings and expectations that shape relationships between states — is formed by the perceptions and realties of power, and especially how changes in relative power affect the workings of the international order. Moreover, after a period during the Cold War in which geostrategic calculations were based more on military than on economic factors, we are rediscovering the centrality of economic power as the key driver of geostrategic relationships.

There is a simple reason for this: we are living through and period of remarkable economic transformation, which is driving shifts in relative economic weight of a scale and speed that we have not seen for many decades, if ever. And China is the key.

Read more…

Author: Peter Van Ness, International Relations, ANU

During his first days in office, President Obama banned torture and restricted US interrogations to the non-coercive methods of the US Army Field Manual. He also ordered the closing of Guantanamo Bay and the CIA’s secret prisons abroad.

More recently, the President published some of the internal memos written by Bush administration lawyers that attempted to argue that torture was legal. By taking decisive action, President Obama hoped to deal with the problem and put the issue to rest. But the debate about torture is still raging.

The fact that the United States used torture in the interrogation of people captured during President Bush’s ‘war on terror’ is obviously a serious and complicated issue. This essay aims only to clarify three aspects: the language, legal status, and responsibility for this controversial policy.

Read more…