Special Report: Chun on the ROK-U.S. Relationship after President Obama’s Asia Trip

Toward a Smart Alliance: The ROK-U.S. Relationship after President Obama’s Asia Trip

By Chaesung Chun

Read another version of this opinion in Korean here.

Asia is the region where a quarter of the total of American products is consumed, major bilateral allies exist, various networks of multilateral institutions operate, and new powers are rising. President Obama, during his first Asia trip, tried to emphasize that America is an Asia-Pacific power that will continue its commitment through a renewed East Asia strategy of “power of balance.” Now at the crossroads of China’s foreign policy of “harmony,” Japan’s new concept of “fraternity,” and South Korea’s catchphrase of “pragmatic foreign policy,” the United States needs to refresh its role which has been defined as a “regional stabilizer.” People in Asia are eager to see President Obama’s new approach to his East Asia strategy, because he inherited from his predecessor a triple crisis in the areas of security, soft power, and economy. President Obama’s recent Asia trip has certainly attracted the minds of many people in Asia with his concepts of strong “partnership,” and a positive-sum Asian future, as expressed in his address at the Suntory Hall, Japan. As the communication power of a network becomes more important in 21st century international politics, President Obama’s Asia trip means a lot with his efforts for public diplomacy.

Putting aside images and metaphors, the strategic orientation of the United States’ East Asia strategy still needs to be more specified. People in Asia are concerned about four areas: 1) how the United States will cooperate with a rising China in producing a consensus in many sensitive and difficult areas such as military competition, economic interdependence, climate change, and ideational orientation; 2) how the United States will redefine the role of bilateral alliances which should go beyond the task of military cooperation, stretching to regional security and non-traditional security issues; 3) how the United States will facilitate the creation and the development of multilateral cooperative institutions by actively participating in them; 4) and how the US will deal with security threats such as the North Korean nuclear crisis, cross-Strait relations, East Asian nationalism, and, most of all, regional power transition. So far, the United States seems to be more focused upon recovery from the economic crisis and getting help from various Asian partners in this effort. That leaves open the question of how to redefine the United States’ role in the rapidly changing environment of Asian international relations.

Despite a relatively short stay in Seoul for about 20 hours, President Obama confirmed his commitment to South Korea with renewed words and statements: he underscored the importance of the KORUS FTA not just from an economic perspective, but also from a strategic standpoint; he promised to provide continued extended nuclear deterrence; he basically agreed with South Korea’s approach to resolving the North Korean nuclear problem through a more comprehensive deal; and he highlighted new areas of cooperation at the global level such as climate change, Afghanistan, economic recovery, and the development of the G-20. South Koreans expect that the KORUS FTA will be the stepping stone for strengthening bilateral economic and strategic relations, recovery of both countries’ economies, and improving interdependent regional economic relations. Regarding the North Korean nuclear crisis, it seems that there is still a lot more to be done in making North Korea give up completely its nuclear program. This will require more intense and creative dialogue between Seoul and Washington. As North Korea has not made any strategic decision regarding its nuclear program and any future national strategic orientation, its return to the Six-Party Talks will only just be the beginning in yet another difficult series of negotiations. South Korea, as a strong American ally and a potential global middle power, will continue to work closely with the United States. The two countries need to search for new tasks and functions for bilateral cooperation in a world of rapidly changing international relations, where “smart” alliance and “21st century international statecraft” are required.

Posted by Matthew Shannon Stumpf on November 23, 2009. Respond »

Special Report: Zhu Feng on the Results of Obama’s Visit to China

President Obama’s Visit: A New Milestone for the Beijing-Washington Relationship

US President Barack Obama’s China visit concluded in the late afternoon of November 18, 2009, after swiftly surveying the land of the oldest civilization in the world. In the short time span of three days, he stopped at Shanghai talking about his conception of American values before four hundred students; walked into the People’s Hall, a centerpiece of Beijing’s architecture since end of the 1950s and the seat of China’s political establishment, to meet with his Chinese counterpart President Hu Jintao and to speak at a joint press conference. He also chatted with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, toured the Forbidden City, and climbed the Great Wall in the footsteps of his predecessors Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who all chose to visit the Wall for their sight-seeing. Despite a very short visit, the effects of President Obama’s visit are likely not yet fully understood, but rather a sort of shock which is still rippling out.

The significance of his visit does not lie in its tribute to Chinese leadership. Any argument to this effect is bitter, tedious and misleading. His visit was actually meant to lay out new groundwork for both countries to strengthen cooperation and push forth the concerted diplomacy. Also, his visit is a brilliant promotion of American policy of China in the new era, when bilateral ties have never been more important for the future of peace, stability and prosperity. Moreover, his visit is a great effort to solidify collaboration with admiration for Chinese civilization and goodwill, rather than confrontation, deferring to basic human conscience.

Many Chinese clearly read the message President Obama firmly and unambiguously delivered to China and Chinese people along his Asian tour. He made the point at Tokyo “US has no intent to contain China” and “China’s rise will offer new source of new growth and momentum.” Such policy clarity is very timely and important as some Chinese hardliners still retain the conviction that the US has conspired to ward off China’s ascent. Of course, President Obama dealt with his China concerns in a very direct way and pulled no punches. He said to President Hu Jintao “America’s bedrock beliefs that all men and women possess certain fundamental human rights,” “are universal rights”, and “should be available to all people.”

Both in rhetoric and gesture, President Obama presented his graceful moderation. He didn’t want to leave the impression with Chinese people that he is a mere westernized cleric of democracy. Instead, he performed the role in China to steadily address American concerns while creating the momentum for expected resonation. Obviously, he is not a magician who could make water part, but he is a leader who truly knows how to get things moving in a sound direction. In a state like China, no magic upshot could be unilaterally desired.

Thus the significance of his visit can be gauged not by how much concession he achieved from Chinese side, but by how well-received his goodwill, crystal clear message and his vision, a purely distinctive and extraordinary Obama vision, were, and how it helped in the handling of “important but complicated” relations between Washington and Beijing.

Yes, it appears that President Obama yielded little achievement from his China tour in the terms of a long list of American anxieties about China, such as Iranian issue, concern about balanced trade, CNY revaluation and even emission reductions. However, China would have similarly complained a lot if the success of President Obama’s visit was assessed based only on how many items from this list the two sides agreed on. Beijing had a long list of concerns, also, which have been left aside. In particular, China protests U.S. trade protectionism. President Obama ceded nothing to his Chinese counterparts.

Pleasingly, both the leaders—President Obama and President Hu—have signed up to a historic “Joint Statement.” With full coverage of almost every corner of their bilateral relationship, the statement listed up their enormous contending concerns and, meanwhile, set forth refreshing guiding principles to address them. There is no doubt that, the central achievement of this document is the establishment of “cooperation, reciprocity and mutual respect.”

That’s enough for the moment. Surely, the U.S. and China will face many political, economic and possibly military challenges in the future. Merely talking is far from enough, and acting and responding benignly will definitely be required. If that is the way forward, tying our relations tightly to “cooperation, reciprocity and mutual respect” is an important start.

Posted on November 19, 2009. Respond »

Special Report: Vatikiotis on ASEAN and the US, Helping to Reinforce SE Asia’s Centrality

It took some persuading to entice the United States back into serious engagement with ASEAN. The outgoing Bush administration had managed to relegate official presence at yearly ASEAN meetings to an Undersecretary from the State Department. The incoming Obama administration was happy to sign on to the bedrock Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and restore ministerial level presence at annual ASEAN meetings. But ASEAN Secretary General Surin Pitsuwan asked Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to go one step further and take the engagement to the leadership level. She readily agreed.

The upgrade came not a moment too soon. For with Australia and Japan both courting the region with their own visions of a wider East Asian grouping, ASEAN feared relegation or even dismemberment.  This explains one of the key phrases in the joint statement issued by the US and ASEAN after the Summit in Singapore on 15. November. “We shared a vision of a regional architecture that is inclusive, promotes shared values and norms, and respects the diversity within the region. We agreed to work closely together in building this regional architecture, and were ready to study initiatives of this nature,” runs the statement. But it also unequivocally adds: “We reaffirmed the importance of ASEAN centrality in this process.”

Some ASEAN officials are quietly hoping that the US-ASEAN engagement essentially kills off the Australian initiative that aims at drawing largest ASEAN member state Indonesia into an Asia Pacific grouping focused on security, a prospect that caused great anxiety in smaller ASEAN states like Singapore. It also helps take the sting out of the Japanese idea, focused more on economic cooperation, which also threatens to marginalize ASEAN. The idea is that with the US so closely engaged with ASEAN at the highest level, neither Japan nor Australia can afford to downgrade ASEAN’s position in these larger groupings.

The Singapore summit also generated other important signals. There was an endorsement of sorts for ASEAN’s role in the G20 process that the whole world seems to be joining. And for those who believe strongly in the need to cement in place the Human Rights mechanism called for by the ASEAN Charter, it was important that the US expressed support for the establishment of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, and reinforced the sentiment by inviting members of the Commission to visit the United States next year to consult with international experts.

Posted by Michael Vatikiotis on November 19, 2009. Respond »

Special Report: Rajagopalan on Feminist Flashpoints in East Asia

As President Obama travels through East Asia, he provides South Asian feminist scholars with an opportunity to look east and review those issues that have been contentious for women’s rights activists. Each of the President’s stopovers has its own feminist flashpoints that are either consequences of society’s engagement with the outside world or that have consequences for that engagement. 

The movement of people is one of the main sources of concern for Japanese feminists. Women’s immigration from other parts of Asia into Japan when legal is largely in the “entertainment” category, with most immigrants working as bar hostesses, in factories, as commercial sex workers or waitresses. International marriages through brokers are known; along with the old pattern of Japanese wife/ non-Japanese husband now there are also Japanese men who seek non-Japanese but Asian wives either for more control in the marriage or for sham marriages that cover up and facilitate exploitation. (See Vera Mackie’s Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 for more.)

The Japanese also have to confront their status both as perpetrators and victims on the question of wartime sexual exploitation. If the use of “comfort women” during Japan’s mid-20th century occupation of Korea is a history Japan has to live down at minimum and apologize and compensate for at best, then Japan’s own experience with the US presence in Okinawa has been similar. Either way, women have simply been the spoils of militarization, not uniquely in East Asia but here this issue has acquired both feminist and nationalist resonance.

Singaporean women’s organizations have to walk a tightrope, calling attention to social inequities without criticizing the state; placing the blame on culture without blaming religion; being political by virtue of working on political questions, but all the while abjuring politics. Reproductive rights have been one arena of activism, but in insider-for-self-correction mode rather than as dissent or critique of the state’s agenda. Many women from other parts of Asia come to Singapore to undertake jobs as domestic workers. Their status and their rights become political issues in their countries of origin, but in my admittedly cursory search, it was not clear how much their presence registered with the local women’s movement. (Lenore Lyons has written a great deal on the women’s movement in Singapore.)

Shanghai is now one of Asia’s showpiece cities; Beijing is one of its oldest capitals. Through much of the twentieth century, women activists were as focused on nation-building and social modernization issues as their male colleagues. State feminism under the People’s Republic did self-consciously address the institutional and many structural issues relating to the status of women. In the public sphere, gender became irrelevant for both men and women in many ways. Since the 1990s, when China has opened up to the world and western feminist writing has been translated and made available, Chinese feminists are now critiquing this same effacement of gender identity and blaming this for the invisibility of women in many spheres.

From a South Asian perspective, what is most interesting is to look at the impact of how China has opened up and grown, on women’s lives, their decision-making frames and freedoms and finally, gendered expectations that they may now face. Given that China’s political opening is yet to equal its economic changes, it is hard to see what the emerging internal critiques and debates are among Chinese feminists. Whatever they are, they matter for international relations for two reasons. One, there are a lot of aspirants to growth along the Chinese model (or should I say, Shanghai model). For them, this could be an early warning of problems they should anticipate and address. Two, insofar as the Shanghai model is identified elsewhere with the replacement by American-style capitalist economics of socialist development models, its failures will be seen as American failures, exported to Asia. It is in US interests to appear introspective and self-critical with regard to socio-economic issues on the home-front.

Two important strands to the women’s activism in Korea appear to be improving working conditions for women and of course, the issue of “comfort women.” As elsewhere, sexual violence—its prevention, protection issues and victim support services—is a priority for most organizations. It was hard to find very descriptive accounts from which I could learn more.

Two issues seem to recur in this region. The first relates to democracy and space in the public sphere for social activism at all: in its absence or where it is strained, how likely is it that activists will prioritize women’s rights over civil rights and political reform agendas? Women are likely, yet again, to have to take a number and wait their turn. The other is that although my post scarcely suggests it, sexual violence is an important rallying point. Reading about Japan, I learned that in some cases, what were originally shelters for refugees were also taking in victims of domestic violence. That to me really underscores the continuum of violence in which most women’s lives play out. And violence in the name of the state—during war, to reinforce state rules, to ensure regime survival—is one stretch on this continuum.

States are bound by international convention to do business with other states. What this means is that when any head of state comes calling, s/he must meet and confer with whatever regime is in power. A strident discourse on human rights and democracy usually becomes background noise as a summit plays out—that’s diplomacy. But where then is the space for women’s rights issues to be raised and discussed in the international arena? Will we have seen something new in the course of President Obama’s international excursions this time and in coming months?

Posted by Swarna Rajagopalan on November 19, 2009. Respond »

Special Report: Acharya on Obama from a Southeast Asian Perspective

In a new Sigur Center for Asian Studies “Asia Report,” Amitav Acharya examines how Southeast Asians view Obama as a person and as a president, and how Obama’s election has affected domestic politics in Southeast Asia. Read the full report here.

Acharya concludes that:

Southeast Asians perceive foreign events in terms of local and domestic politics ...

Overall, there is general belief that the Obama administration will revive ties with the region. Obama’s iteration of a multilateral approach to foreign policy in recent months is very much in line with regional efforts towards multilateralism via institutions such as ASEAN and the Bali Democracy Forum.

Moreover, Obama’s victory reinvigorated the debate on democracy in the region and introduced a new dimension to the prospects of democracy in Southeast Asia. The possibility for change in the region is a real one.

Posted on November 18, 2009. Respond »