Like no other American politician, the President is aware of the dramatic reversal in relationship between his new and old homes.
Barack Obama has embarked on his tour of four Asian countries (India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan); and you might expect him to have a full foreign-policy agenda. Relations between Japan and China have deteriorated sharply following the Japanese seizure of a Chinese fishing boat. South Korea, another stalwart American client, has much to fear from the political transitions of its mysterious neighbour.
India and Indonesia also present some complex strategic challenges. The dispute in Kashmir, which Mr. Obama identified as among his “critical tasks” in 2008, clearly saps Pakistan's commitment to America's war in Afghanistan. After two cancelled trips to Indonesia, Mr. Obama finally has the chance this week to commemorate his childhood in the country, and to re-engage his audience in the Muslim world that he first addressed in Cairo in 2009.
However, Mr. Obama insists on defining his mission in Asia in less than lofty terms. “We need to find,” he wrote in an op-ed last week in the New York Times, “new customers in new markets for American-made goods.” This article, which went on about trade pacts with South Korea, Indonesia's chairmanship of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean), and the importance of creating thousands of American jobs, had not a word to say about the political and military role of the U.S. in Asia.
Visiting India, Mr. Obama has remained on message, talking about business deals and American jobs. He may be feeling a bit chastened after the setbacks in U.S. midterm elections last week. Certainly he must stem growing unemployment as well as stimulate an economic recovery if he hopes to win a second term as President in 2012. And he may be trying to avoid the impression of being too preoccupied with abstruse foreign policy issues.
Still, Mr. Obama's geopolitical diffidence acknowledges an undeniable fact: that America, weakened by the recession and successive military-diplomatic failures, can no longer dictate the course of events in Asia — a power it exercised, with often devastating effect, throughout the cold war.
The oft-repeated story of China's rise is only part of the explanation for this. More importantly, mass politicisation and economic regionalism have emboldened many Asian countries that previously followed America's lead or cowered in its long shadow.
There is probably no American politician more aware of this impalpable but dramatic turnaround than Mr. Obama, who lived on a mud lane in Jakarta in the late 1960s, and visited Pakistan and India as a student in 1981. He came of age when the United States still wore the mantle it had inherited from European empires in the east; and many American officials, politicians and intellectuals dreamed, as Lawrence of Arabia once had, “of hustling into form ... the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us”.
Two years before the six-year-old Mr. Obama moved with his mother to Jakarta, the CIA colluded in the killing, by military and paramilitary Muslim groups, of nearly half-a-million suspected Communists in Indonesia. Indonesia during General Suharto's long New Order (1967-1998) became a perfect client of the United States.
There were always high-class intellectual justifications available for crony capitalism and military brutality of the kind Suharto specialised in. In 1968 Samuel Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies, which in terms of political effect seems more influential — and malign — than The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the Political Order. Pro-American despots from Suharto to South Korea's Park Chung-hee and the Shah of Iran took careful note of Mr. Huntington's emphasis on the utmost necessity of political stability and military modernisation.
Another beneficiary of the American preference for sturdy anti-Communism over messy democracy was Pakistan's General Zia-ul-Haq. In 1954, the year Pakistan along with Turkey and Iran was drafted into the cold war, the great Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto addressed “Uncle Sam” in a series of satirical (and prophetic) letters. “Dear Uncle,” he wrote, “you are seriously concerned about the stability of the world's largest Islamic state since our Mullah is the best antidote to Russian communism.” By 1981, the year Mr, Obama visited Pakistan, Zia had persuaded the United States that global jihad was the correct response to monolithic Communism.
Of course, none of the political and economic arrangements frozen during the cold war were destined to last; and they melted in their own way, often causing a more extensive chaos than the one Mr. Huntington feared. Mass revolts finally unseated Suharto, plunging Indonesia into a turbulent period of democratisation. General Zia departed mysteriously in a plane crash; but the religious-political passions he unleashed are still with us, partly feeding on the cruel injustices of Pakistan's feudal society that Mr. Obama witnessed on his visit to the country.
The military may have been forced out of politics in Indonesia. In Pakistan it still slyly fattens itself on feckless American aid. Indeed, Pakistani military and intelligence have refined their money-extraction ruses into an art form even as popular sentiment in Pakistan turns overwhelmingly against the United States. But then, as Manto put it to Uncle Sam: “I am your Pakistani nephew and I know your moves. Everyone can now become a smartass, thanks to your style of playing politics.” Almost everywhere in Asia, the United States finds itself distrusted, outmanoeuvred and encircled, by present allies (Pakistan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai) as well as erstwhile protégés.
Decades after getting rid of the Shah, Iran's rulers can still draw upon strong anti-western passions as it bankrolls its proxies and friends in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Lebanon and Gaza. The politicians and businessmen of Japan and South Korea can barely keep a lid on mass opposition to America's lingering Cold War presence in the region. Malaysia, from where I write, consistently “looked east” for its economic growth in the last three decades. Here, the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 stigmatised American policies long before the “Washington consensus” received its final rites elsewhere.
The shrinking of American influence is apparent even in India, whose political and business elites adore U.S. wealth and power with an embarrassing intensity. India remained as protective of its farmers as ever at the stalled Doha round of talks. The Bush administration's generous gift of a nuclear deal has not made India much more hospitable to American investors and exporters.
As Mr. Obama will find out, India has many more likely and rewarding partners in booming Asia than in the recession-hit West. Politically damaged Thailand as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan have recovered from the downturn. Last year India signed a major free-trade deal with Asean (the Association of South East Asian Nations). Not surprisingly a columnist in the Star, Malaysia's leading newspaper in English, deemed the Indian Prime Minister's visit to Kuala Lumpur last week more important than the jaunt of Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, to the region at the same time.
A tangle of bilateral trade agreements underpins Asia's new economic unity. China and Asean countries already constitute the biggest free-trade zone in the world. Asian fears of China's rise, which the United States keenly monitors, look minor beside the fact that China is now the largest export market for Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, in addition to being India's biggest trading partner.
All this sounds a planet away from those Tea-Partying Americans who think that the U.S. can bomb its way out of any political and economic difficulties abroad. It now falls to Mr. Obama to advance their education; and he will most likely fail in this thankless task. But it cannot be said that this President, once a street kid in Jakarta, did not try, or that he ever imagined he could hustle into form the new and intractable Asia. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010
(Pankaj Mishra is author of Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tibet)