Asia pivot a go-go

The U.S. has also pledged to put 2,500 marines in northern Australia, as well as regional missile-defense systems with the stated purpose of further deterring North Korea.

These alleged North Korean maneuvers nevertheless have “spooked” Australia, according to Peter Jennings, the head of the government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute. He views China to be at the heart of any U.S. military buildup in the region.

And Jennings is not alone.

The American military buildup has predictably been a growing cause for concern in Beijing, when combined with the Obama Administration’s encouraging the Philippines and Vietnam to take a tougher position against Beijing over disputed territory in the resource-rich South China Sea.

China is further upset over the Obama Administration’s recent call for a multilateral solution to this mounting and contentious territorial dispute. The Chinese have instead suggested bilateral negotiations, that the countries involved “can maintain peace and stability” without American involvement, according to Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying.

If China still had doubts as to American intentions, during a debate last month Obama bluntly stated that increased military actions in the Asia-Pacific were indeed a response to China’s growing influence, strengthening the widely held idea that the American pivot is partly to contain China.

Obama’s hawkish anti-Chinese rhetoric on the campaign trail coincided closely with U.S.complaints before the World Trade Organization over China’s allegedly illegal subsidization of its auto industry. And only a couple weeks ago, the U.S. International Trade Commission leviedsizeable punitive tariffs against Chinese solar companies.

All of which will certainly cast a long shadow over Obama’s Pacific visit.

China’s indignant response to Obama’s Asian pivot even led political science professor Robert Ross of Boston College to call it “unnecessary and counterproductive” in the pages of Foreign Affairs. “We’re stoking the fires of nationalism. No great power could be expected to sit there and benignly accept changes in the status quo that undermine its security,” Ross reiterated to theWall Street Journal.

But continued Sino-American head butting is by no means inevitable.

Despite Obama’s military maneuvers and China’s militant mishandling of the South China Sea, American interest in Asia-Pacific economic expansion instead offers the possibility of stronger Sino-American trade relations.

Upon Obama’s reelection, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman even acknowledged that “China is willing to work with the U.S. . . . to promote the Sino-U.S. partnership to achieve new and greater development and to better benefit the two peoples and the people of the world.”

Perhaps President Obama will extend an olive branch of his own when he lands in Cambodia for the annual ASEAN summit this week.