SINGAPORE — When President Obama announced Monday that he was ending a half-century-long arms embargo against Vietnam, it was another milestone in his long-running ambition to recast America’s role in Asia — a “pivot” as he once called it, designed to realign America’s foreign policy so it can reap the benefits of Asia’s economic and strategic future.
Yet as Mr. Obama’s time in office comes to an end, Asian nations are deeply skeptical about how much they can rely on Washington’s commitment and staying power in the region. They sense that for the first time in memory, Americans are questioning whether their economic and defense interests in Asia are really that vital.
Mr. Obama is the first president to have grown up in the region — he lived in Indonesia as an elementary school student — and he has never doubted that America is underinvested in Asia and overinvested in the Middle East.
In visit after visit, he has capitalized on the palpable nervousness about Beijing’s intentions while also cautioning that China’s growing influence and power are unstoppable forces of history. In Mr. Obama’s view, that means both the United States and the rest of the region will have to both accommodate and channel China’s ambitions rather than make a futile attempt to contain them, while reassuring the Chinese of America’s peaceful intentions.
At the core, the policy has been building on the two-decade-old opening to Vietnam; the establishment of a new relationship with Myanmar as it lurches toward democracy; closer relations with the two largest treaty allies in the region, Japan and South Korea; and renewed military ties with the Philippines. The administration has also pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would set new terms for trade and business investment among the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations.
Perhaps most important, Mr. Obama has received unexpected help from the Chinese themselves, who have so overplayed their hand in the South China Sea that smaller neighbors suddenly took a new interest in deepening their relations with Washington.
Countering those developments, though, is the American political mood, which has darkened toward longstanding alliances and international trade itself. For Asian allies, this means the United States might pivot away.
“Every country in Asia views the problem differently, and through their own lenses, but they all see a twofold risk of things getting out of balance quickly,” Kurt M. Campbell, one of the architects of Mr. Obama’s strategy in his first term, said on Monday. “One is that China seriously overplays its nationalism” and that conflict breaks out in the South China Sea.
But Mr. Campbell, who is about to publish an account of Mr. Obama’s efforts titled “The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia,” also noted that Asian nations were equally worried that America is no longer willing to be a steadying power.
“Asian countries are prone to anxiety about the behavior of major powers, for good reasons — they have seen a lot go wrong over the past thousand years,” said Daniel R. Russel, the assistant secretary of state for Asia. “And now there is angst about what comes next and the sustainability of the rebalance.”
What China Has Been Building in the South China Sea
China has been feverishly piling sand onto reefs in the South China Sea, creating seven new islets in the region and straining already taut geopolitical tensions.
The Vietnamese gave Mr. Obama a huge welcome on Monday, lining the streets in ways reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s first presidential trip there 16 years ago. But missing from the news conferences was the hard-core group in the leadership that remains deeply suspicious that Washington’s real long-term goal is regime change.
So while almost certainly they will buy American arms — especially the high-tech gear they need to keep an eye on what the Chinese are doing at the edge of Vietnam’s territorial waters — they have no intention of building the kind of alliance the United States has with Japan and South Korea. “Now that the U.S. fully lifted the weapons ban, I think U.S. Navy vessels will come to Cam Ranh Bay later this year,” said Alexander L. Vuving, a specialist on Vietnam at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
Last week, as the streets of Hanoi were being cleaned up for the president’s visit, the Chinese were meeting with Vietnam’s defense minister, pledging to strengthen their military ties.
In the Philippines, the firebrand who has just been elected president, Rodrigo Duterte, once promised to ride a Jet Ski to plant a flag on one of the artificial islands the Chinese have constructed. More recently, he is backing away from the current government’s effort to press its sovereignty arguments, saying he wants to negotiate directly with the Chinese, perhaps swapping a little sovereignty for some economic concessions. That is just the kind of invitation the Chinese wanted to hear.
Mr. Obama’s vision is certainly nuanced. As Mr. Campbell writes in his book, the trick in the pivot is to build a deep relationship with the Chinese to convince not only “China but also China’s neighbors that our China policy is not intended to produce needless and unproductive friction.”
Containment “has little or no relevance to the complexities of an interdependent Asia in which most states have deep economic ties with China.”
The Chinese are unconvinced. One of the key military elements of the strategy is for American troops to “rotate” through strategically important Asian ports — not to be based there, but to be able to land, refuel, train and build partnerships.
It started with Darwin, Australia. Now Mr. Obama is trying to do the same in the Philippines, which the United States left more than two decades ago, and at the deepwater port of Cam Ranh Bay, if the unspoken deal with Vietnam works out. That would give Washington more reason to regularly traverse waters the Chinese claim as their exclusive zone. But it is unclear that presence is large enough to deter further Chinese expansion.
The biggest challenge, however, is on the home front. Donald J. Trump’s threat to withdraw American forces from South Korea and Japan unless they pay far more of the cost — and they already pay much of it — may just be a negotiating position. But it suggests that the United States has no independent national interests in the Pacific. That would be a rejection of a post-World War II order that goes back to the Truman administration.
The real glue may well be the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the big, unwieldy trade deal that involves a dozen nations, but not the Chinese. Mr. Russel notes that for President Obama, the agreement “fulfills the strategic promise of the rebalance, as a system that integrates the U.S. with the Asian-Pacific region.”
Good geopolitics, though, often makes for bad domestic politics. Even some of Hillary Clinton’s top foreign policy aides were astounded by her decision to declare herself against a deal she often praised. After all, in November 2012, just before she left the State Department, she did not sound like she had a lot of doubts: “Our growing trade across the region, including our work together to finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership, binds our countries together, increases stability and promotes security,” she said then.
The question is whether the opposite is also true: Having put America’s Pacific strategy on the line, if the deal fails does that mean the binding glue will loosen, and stability and security will be imperiled? And if so will the leaders of Asia see that as another reason to welcome Mr. Obama’s successor one week, and visit Beijing and Moscow the next?