President Barack Obama will leave the country for a four-nation tour of Asia starting Wednesday despite a host of domestic concerns, including the massacre at Fort Hood, a sharply rising jobless rate, his health care legislation stalled in the Senate and his Afghanistan troop decision still pending.
He planned his Nov. 11-19 trip around the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Singapore, but added stops in Japan, China and South Korea. The itinerary reflects the growing importance of East Asia - especially China - to everything from financing U.S. debt and powering the global economic recovery to climate change, disease control and containing nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran.
Asia's importance in global affairs rose over the past decade as U.S. foreign policy was dominated by the war on terror, and as U.S. domestic spending and borrowing from foreign countries spiraled.
"These phenomena have persuaded many Asians that the U.S. is overextended and distracted" and a declining power, said Jeff Bader, the National Security Council's senior director for East Asian Affairs.
Obama intends to use his trip to counter those doubts.
"I think it will be vividly clear for the peoples of Asia that the U.S. is here to stay in Asia," Bader said. " ... The U.S. will be a player and participant on the ground floor, not a distant spectator."
China, the world's most populous nation with 1.3 billion people - and the most important one on this trip - holds more U.S. debt than any other country. Japan, a U.S. security ally, is the second-largest U.S. creditor.
"Look at the large picture of things, of what places matter to the United States, think about it in terms of the economic weight of Asia these days, of where the world's population lives, of where the rising powers are: all of that is taking place in Asia," said Daniel Sneider, associate director for research at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.
"These are the economies that are going to drive the world economy increasingly. This is the dynamic part of the world. And our future as a nation is tied heavily in every respect to that part of the world."
Obama won't visit India, the other rising Asian power, or Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority nation, where he spent part of his childhood. He's planning a separate, more personal trip later to Indonesia, and India will be the first nation he honors with a state dinner at the White House, on Nov. 24, days after his return.
The Asia venture will bring to 20 the number of countries that Obama has visited in his first year in office, a new presidential record.
It also will come weeks before an international gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark, to seek a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.S. hasn't committed itself to caps on emissions that cause global warming and so isn't in a position to browbeat China, a fast-rising global economic power and the world's top polluter, into agreeing to any. Obama may try to allay criticism of inaction by announcing joint conservation and alternative energy projects with Asian partners.
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