Despite Asian pivot, the US eventually must share Pacific power with China

OWL’S HEAD, Maine — Judging the success of presidential trips is a tricky process. Even if the results aren't immediately obvious — or if they seem less than positive — an opportunity to spend serious face-to-face time with key world leaders is inherently valuable.

Nevertheless, President Obama’s trip to the Far East certainly wasn't a triumph, whether with him in Tokyo or looking from afar to Ukraine or the Middle East. As the The New York Times headlined it, "Obama Suffers Setbacks in Japan and the Mideast."

The setback in the Mideast was hardly a surprise and hardly Obama's fault: it's been nothing but a series of failures there, for whoever has been in charge.

Japan was another matter. According to press reports, Obama had been hoping to get Japanese agreement to open its markets in rice, beef and poultry as a key component of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the regional trade pact that the Obama administration has been promoting.

But the fact that the White House had implied it would get Japanese acquiescence was a mistake. Obama tried to paper it over by saying, "Prime Minister Abe has got to deal with his politics; I've got to deal with mine." Still, it seemed an unnecessarily amateurish first step in his long-ballyhooed Asian pivot. Someone had clearly given him bad advice.

Even worse advice, if less earthshaking, was laid bare in news conference in which the leaders, according to the Times, “referred to each other a bit stiffly as Barack and Shinzo."

Caroline Kennedy has only been the American ambassador in Tokyo for a couple of weeks, so it is doubtful the first-name suggestion came from her; and it surely didn't come from the Japanese. Anyone who has spent even an hour in Tokyo is aware that Japanese do not call each other by their first names. Minor stuff, to be sure, but a key point of diplomacy is to make life easier when two cultures collide.

Life was not easy for the president and the prime minister. Apart from the failure to move forward on the trade talks, what was discussed on the macro level, such as the fault line between the American domination of the 20th century and the potential Chinese domination of the 21st?

Reassuring allies that "we have their back" is certainly part of the role Obama must play. From a diplomatic point of view, he played it quite well, walking a fine line between re-affirming US treaty obligations to Japan while backing away from their sovereignty claims over islands China lays claim to as well.

Bucking up our friends and allies in Asia is a necessary part of the equation, but the real substance is in working out an arrangement with China — tacitly, implicitly, indirectly, but undeniably — that paves a peaceful way for a China whose influence in the South China Sea surpasses our own.

Both the Chinese and the US are Pacific powers, but while change is incremental, it is real: China will replace the US as the dominant power in its immediate backyard.

In the East China Sea, bordered by Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, China will be elbowing its way into an increasingly prominent position that Japan will expect the US to forestall. The good news is that both China and the US are trading nations. Keeping the sea lanes open is in all our interests.

But things are changing. From the end of World War II, the US, with its NATO allies playing second fiddle, maintained a cold peace with the Soviet Union. On the high seas, this meant an Atlantic Ocean controlled by the West. In the Pacific, it was even less of a contest. China was essentially in the same international state it had been since a Ming dynasty emperor grounded his massive fleet and turned inward in the 15th century.

This will change dramatically over the next generation or two, gradually, inexorably. Nixon's opening to China took vision and diplomatic skill. But it was helped by one simple fact: both China and the US saw an advantage in such a move because of the threat both perceived from the Soviet Union.

Today, despite Putin's aggression in the Ukraine, Russia is a declining power, while China is on the rise. The real zero-sum game will be between the US and China.

By 2050, perhaps sooner, the western Pacific will no longer be controlled by the US; it will be shared with China. That's the reality; getting there peacefully is the problem.

Mac Deford is retired after a career as a Foreign Service officer, an international banker, and a museum director. He lives at Owls Head, Maine and still travels frequently to the Middle East.