Amateur Hour?

Andrew is making entirely too much of thesenewsstories that Fallows has tracked down. Fallows was right to reject the excessive criticism of Obama’s Asia trip. For my part, I didn’t think the trip should be judged on the basis of winning concessions on issues on which China was unlikely to budge. If the trip yielded a few minimal gestures of cooperation on contentious issues, so much the better, but that is not why the critics of the Asia trip were wrong. When push comes to shove, Russia and China are not going to join a new round of sanctions against Iran, and it seems improbable that China will follow through on any of the pledges it has started to make, so we should not expect the “gains” now being reported to lead to anything significant. What Obama did manage to do was to maintain and improve the quality of our relationships with several major powers. This is valuable in itself. If that is considered a waste of presidential time and prestige, perhaps we have an all together too elevated and inflated view of the President’s importance in world affairs.

As minor as the Russian and Chinese gestures are, these recent reports do put the odd complaints of Leslie Gelb and Peggy Noonan in a different light. Noonan leaned heavily on Gelb’s charge of “amateurism” to support her argument this weekend. Gelb’s main complaint is that Obama did not push for some preeminent American role in East Asia’s own organizations, but there’s no reason to think that he should have been doing this. Gelb wants to see Obama imitate post-WWII Atlanticist policies and apply them to East Asia, which obviously takes no account of how very different East Asia today is from the Europe of sixty years ago. Noonan took Gelb’s dissatisfaction as evidence that Obama was losing the “foreign policy establishment,” which is a pretty big conclusion to draw from one op-ed, and given Gelb’s track record I’m not sure that I would want to hear him praising my administration if I were Obama. One thing that’s quite remarkable about the “foreign policy establishment” is how wrong it gets most of the big questions. If they are clamoring for Obama to do more in Asia, he should probably ignore them.

The U.S. is not in any position to act as an “architect” of new economic or security structures in Asia beyond what already exists. We are going to participate to some extent in the structures that Asian nations create, but the preeminence and centrality of U.S. leadership are never going to be as great in East Asia in the coming decades as it was in western Europe in the ’40s and ’50s. Because of that, the U.S. is going to make big “gains” less often and sometimes not at all, and that is a reality we have to recognize and adapt to in the years to come.