Obama reviving US clout in Asia as China stumbles

Experts said the United States, China as well as the rest of Asia — whether it's South Korea and Japan in the northeast or Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Laos in the southeast — all seek and stand to gain from cooperation.

“I don't see this as a contest. It's not a zero-sum game,” said Joe Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution analyst in Washington who served on former president Bill Clinton's National Security Council.

Nonetheless Lieberthal told AFP that Washington's return to its traditional robust role in the Pacific could irk China to the point that it harms bilateral relations, a situation where both nations would lose.

“The concern obviously is whether this is having a serious negative impact on our ties with China, or whether these are kind of bumps in the road,” Lieberthal said.

He suspects some in Beijing's leadership believe that the Obama administration will boost the confidence of China's smaller neighbors to the point it becomes harder for the Asian power to have its way in the region.

The U.S.-China balance, experts said, has shifted since U.S. President Barack Obama took office last year promising to “re-engage” with a region which predecessor George W. Bush's administration had neglected as it focused on the war on terror.

The Asia-Pacific has since seen a flurry of visits by not only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other cabinet members but also senior officials from various government agencies.

Obama, who calls himself the first “Pacific” U.S. president as he was born and raised in Hawaii, has also visited the region although he has twice postponed plans to travel to Indonesia, where he spent part of his childhood.

“We haven't seen this kind of diplomatic attention by the United States to the region at senior levels, where it counts, for a long time,” said Douglas Paal, who has served in previous U.S. administrations.

“It reminds me of what the Chinese did after 1998, when they sort of woke up and thought Southeast Asia was important,” said Paal, now a leading analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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