Delay in Obama trip seen as damaging to US image in Asia-Pacific

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has come under criticism for postponing yet again his trip to Indonesia and Australia.

This decision will send tremors of uncertainty throughout Southeast Asia, said Ernie Bower of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based bipartisan think-tank.

The impact of this decision is that it belies Obama’s pledge to engage the Asia-Pacific region at the highest levels to advance US interests in a serious and sustained manner, said Bower, senior adviser and director of the CSIS Southeast Asia Program.

At a time when the region has serious questions about how far it wants to go with China’s charm offensive, the apparent lack of US focus will make the region’s leaders feel anxious and unbalanced and force them to think about strategic alternatives, Bower said.

Walter Lohman of the conservative Heritage Foundation said it is hard to fault Obama for the latest postponement caused by an unexpected oil blowup as he needs to be home to assert leadership in resolving the environmental crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.

He said with better coordination and balancing of priorities, earlier postponements in March could have been avoided.

“Presidential trips may seem like ‘just protocol’ but these things are not to be taken lightly. There is big downside in messing them up. And right now, that’s exactly what the President is doing. Let’s hope he can pull it together,” Lohman said.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who announced the latest postponement, did not say when the visit would be rescheduled.

The postponement comes in the wake of one of the worst environmental disasters in US history with hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico daily from a ruptured undersea BP well off Louisiana.

Bernard Gordon, a professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, said Obama’s proposed trips to Indonesia and Australia come at the “best of times and the worst of times.”

It is the best of times because US relations with both Jakarta and Canberra have never been better, he said.

But it is also the “worst of times” for a presidential visit to Australia and Southeast Asia because it is Northeast Asia that now consumes most of Washington’s Pacific region attention, he said.

Gordon was referring to the future of the US bases in Okinawa and the tension in the Korean peninsula over the sinking by a North Korean torpedo of a South Korean naval vessel, which caused the loss of 46 lives.

Compared to those Northeast Asian issues, any foreign policy questions posed by Indonesia and Australia may be seen as small beer, though ironically it reflects their success, he wrote in an article.

Gibbs said Obama spoke with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Thursday night and “expressed his deep regret that he has to postpone his trip.”

In March, Obama postponed his visit to Australia and Indonesia twice to remain in Washington for a House vote on his momentous health care bill.

Most commentators count the latest postponement as the third in a series but Lohman counts it as the fourth because he said Indonesians expected Obama in November 2009 as part of the president’s tour of South Korea and China.

The expectation was strong enough that Obama had to personally tell the Indonesian leader that he couldn’t make it then to Jakarta, where he spent his childhood, Lohman said.

When Obama assumed office, he pledged to refocus US commitment and engagement in an Asia-Pacific region practically neglected by President George W. Bush, preoccupied as he was with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama has not yet lived up to his pledge, analysts said.