The United States will try to prove its mettle as an Asian power as it welcomes Pacific leaders this week to Hawaii, hoping a sweeping trade pact will bind together the fast-growing region.
President Barack Obama will show his sun-kissed native state to leaders of 20 other members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum including China, Japan and Russia at talks that will culminate Sunday.
At a time of economic doldrums in developed nations and increasing clout by China, the United States hopes to use its APEC chairmanship to set the terms of a trans-Pacific deal that could breathe life into moribund global trade talks.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who will take part in the summit, recently called for the United States to make a similar investment in establishing Asia's order as it did in post-World War II Europe.
Clinton, writing in Foreign Policy magazine, said that the maintenance of peace in the region "is increasingly crucial to global progress" and that more open markets would help create badly needed jobs in the United States.
"We are committed to cementing APEC as the Asia-Pacific's premier regional economic institution," Clinton wrote, pointing to "demand from the region that America play an active role" in building its institutions.
Michael Green, who served as the top adviser on Asia to former president George W. Bush, said the United States had a strong self-interest in focusing on APEC as the bloc -- which accounts for more than half of global economic output -- spans the Pacific.
"We don't want to see an architecture of trade arrangements and political arrangements in Asia that draw a line down the middle of the Pacific," said Green, now a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Georgetown University.
Obama will head the following week to the Indonesian resort island of Bali for the East Asia Summit -- a meeting with many of the same leaders, but one where some Asian nations had earlier wanted to exclude the United States.
Obama, who early this month also went to the French Riviera for the Group of 20 summit, may face domestic pressure not to spend time at a third summit in Indonesia, where he spent part of his childhood.
Ernie Bower, also at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said an Obama cancelation would reinforce "a narrative -- that the Chinese have promoted, in some sense -- that the Americans are interested in Asia but they're not consistently engaged."
The administration has planned hectic travel to go along with the summit season. Obama plans to head from Hawaii to Australia and Clinton will go to the Philippines, both historic allies of the United States.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently held talks in key security allies Japan and South Korea as well as Indonesia, which the administration sees as a growing partner due to its size, location and tradition of moderate Islam.
Panetta vowed that Asia would remain a US priority despite looming cuts to the defense budget, saying in Japan: "We have the opportunity to strengthen our presence in the Pacific, and we will."
In Hawaii, the United States hopes to announce with eight other countries -- Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam -- the outlines of a free trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
US Trade Representative Ron Kirk recently called it a "21st-century" pact that would ensure labor and environmental standards and pledged to move ahead quickly to flesh out its details.
Leaders will be watching closely in Honolulu if Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda brings Japan into talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a step that would leave China conspicuously on the outside of the US-brokered pact.
But Japan's main agricultural cooperative is strongly opposed, fearing that foreign products would swamp the protected sector. Some US lawmakers are also opposed as they fear stiff competition from top dairy exporter New Zealand.
Critics of globalization have criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership for a lack of detail and voiced fears that US pharmaceutical giants could use the pact to raise the cost of medicine in countries with state-backed health care.
Source: AFP Asian Edition