Obama's Realist Foreign Policy is Set in Motion

From February 16th to the 22nd, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made official visits to four nations in Southeast Asia, namely Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China, thereby completing her first mission as secretary of State. Soon after her return to the U.S., Mr. Obama welcomed his first foreign leader guest, Japanese Premier Aso Taro.

Not long before this, Mr. Obama had paid neighboring Canada a quick visit. When we associate that with Vice President John Biden’s visit to Munich, Richard Holbrooke’s visit to South Asia and George Mitchell’s visit to the Middle East, we can see that the positioning of the Obama administration’s diplomacy has been set in full motion. Almost the entire core of the diplomatic team, from the special envoy, secretary of State and vice president to the president, has been mobilized. They carried out their diplomatic missions through all possible channels available ranging from participating in forums, making official visits and receiving visitors to shuttling back and forth between meetings. In terms of geography, they covered all the important global bases that were of strategic interest to the U.S., from the Middle East, South Asia, Europe to Asia and North America.

Creditor Diplomacy to Mediate Domestic Troubles

The world is watching the Obama administration’s new foreign policy, whose launch is certainly worth taking stock of and evaluating.

Prior to Hillary Clinton’s departure for her Asia tour, the American media played up the uniqueness of her choice of destinations, where she did not visit the Middle East or Europe like her predecessors did, but made the unprecedented choice to visit East Asia first. During her tour, the media focused on the singularity of her performance where there had not been many occasions where she was particularly solemn or delivered a harangue. Instead, she had close interactions with people of every level, and spoke with a feminine air, filling the trip with a more human spirit and thus exhibiting the U.S.’s new image in Asia and even the world. However, after her trip ended, the media then criticized the mildness of her tone – outlets like the “Washington Post” and “Christian Science Monitor” spoke out and criticized her avoidance of talking about human right issues during her visit to China.

In actuality, there were some unarguable facts that the American media knew but were hesitant to reveal amidst all the reporting and the commentary: that Hillary Clinton decided on East Asia as the location for her first tour, with Japan being the first country on her itinerary and China being the last; that she did not pay heed to the interest groups as well as the pressure from public discourses back in the U.S. when she was visiting China, and was unusually toned down when discussing human rights issues; that she subsequently invited Mr. Aso Taro, whose popular support is low and position precarious, as the first foreign guest to the White House. Rather than saying that such a humbling of herself and expenditure of her efforts was a token of the U.S.’s shifting the center of diplomacy eastward from Europe and the Middle East towards Asia, it was more like a debtor in a predicament extending a goodwill gesture to another debtor with whom he or she had implicated.

Up until December last year, China held nearly $700 billion in U.S. treasury bonds, which accounted for 35.4% of the entire scale of U.S. treasury bonds held by foreign central banks and 13.3% of the total sum of the U.S.’s negotiable treasury bonds. Nearly 65% of China’s foreign reserves had been used to buy U.S. treasury bonds. Japan, holding $577.1 billion in treasury bonds, came in second.

Following the introduction of an $800 billion bailout plan prior to President Bush stepping down, the Obama administration once again approved a $787 billion economic stimulus plan not long ago, and this figure would continue to increase. Such a great amount of U.S. dollars to be used for saving the U.S. economy cannot simply come by through an aggressive printing of the currency, and so the Obama administration’s only alternative is to seek assistance from buyers with a huge amount in foreign reserves like China and Japan.

Against such a backdrop, could Hillary Clinton then ask China to rough out the storm together with the U.S. or even to extend a helping hand, but rebuke China on human right issues from the top down? Faced with what Hillary calls the three great crises (the global economic crisis, the global climate changes and the global security crisis), distancing the U.S. from creditors such as China and Japan is clearly out of the question. Between moral idealism centered on human rights and democracy and the realistic need for saving the U.S. from economic woes, Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton have no reasons not to choose the latter.

While the U.S.’s internal problems earnestly await the continual support of creditors like China and Japan, its external troubles were focused on getting itself out of the quicksand that Iraq is becoming, as well as shifting the anti-terrorism focus eastward to Afghanistan and Palestine in the pursuit of new victories in the War on Terror. This too needs outside support, meaning that the U.S. hopes to obtain understanding and cooperation from Palestine, Afghanistan and the rest of the Islamic world. The U.S. also hopes to garner more support in areas like finance and military from allies like Japan and the European Union as its ability is increasingly falling short of its ambitions.

Due to such a realistic need that, whether it was through Holbrooke’s trip to South Asia, Mitchell’s trip to the Middle East or Biden’s speech in Munich, the U.S. gave up its one-sided labor and showed a degree of humility; cut down on the finger-pointing and did more of appealing and listening.

The Obama administration has chosen the realist approach of listening, communication and persuasion without allowing itself to be limited by the moral authority of idealism. The American media had a mixed response to that, which goes to reflect the decline of unilateralism and the complex mentality of helplessness when unilateral hegemony falls.

In any case, a realistic U.S. that advocates smart power, as opposed to an idealistic U.S. that relied heavily on firearms, has undoubtedly more moral appeal, and is in a better position to help the world weather the storm, to recover as well as progress toward peace and prosperity.