Obama savors time in Southeast Asia,
LUANG PRABANG, Laos — President Barack Obama has always liked to move to the languid rhythms of Southeast Asia. On Wednesday, he interrupted a hectic tour of China and Laos to reconnect with his inner Southeast Asian in this beguiling city of Buddhist temples and French colonial villas.
Strolling shoeless under the sloped roofs of a Buddhist monastery, Wat Xieng Thong; shopping for paper lanterns on a side street in the middle of town; drinking from a coconut with a straw while peering at the boats on the Mekong River, Obama savored a tropical afternoon he said reminded him of his early childhood in Indonesia.
“It’s very familiar to me,” Obama said at a town-hall-style meeting of young people at a university here.
For all the nostalgia, there was a geopolitical rationale for the president’s pilgrimage to this former capital. He has made engagement with Southeast Asia a top priority of his foreign policy. And Obama used his session with the group, the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, to promote one of the pillars of that policy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal that includes several Southeast Asian countries, but not China.
A young Vietnamese man asked Obama about the failure of Congress to ratify the trade pact, and whether the prospects for the agreement would be better or worse under a new president. Qualms about the future of the agreement are widespread in Southeast Asia, where Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam are all signatories to it.
“I believe it will be ratified because it’s the right thing to do,” Obama said, offering the audience a brief tutorial in Washington politics.
“We’re in a political season now, and it’s always difficult to get things done,” he said. “Congress isn’t doing much right now; they’re all going home and talking to constituents, trying to get re-elected. After the election, people can refocus attention on why this is so important.”
Obama said the trade agreement was important because it would level the playing field and prevent certain countries from turning inward. Still, he acknowledged that free trade had come under political pressure in the last year, in part because the benefits of these deals are seen by some to flow to the owners of companies rather than workers.
Although Obama was 8,500 miles from Washington, he could not quite let go of election-year politics. At one point, he noted that many societies, particularly in the Arab world, fracture along tribal lines, and that the great virtue of the United States was its openness to people from all races, creeds and nationalities.
“Not everybody in America agrees with me on this, by the way,” Obama said, apparently teeing up an unfavorable reference to the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump. After a pregnant pause, the president smiled and said, “I’ll leave it at that.”
Obama expressed no misgivings about putting so much emphasis on Southeast Asia.
“If we weren’t here, interacting and learning from you, and understanding the culture of the region, we’ll be left behind,” he said. “We’ll miss an opportunity.”
With barely five months left in his term, Obama has begun talking about what he will do after his presidency. One project is to continue his involvement with the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, and he said his presidential center would work with the group. His wife, Michelle, plans to travel more abroad to work on global health issues, he said.
The president flew to Laos to attend a pair of regional conferences: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting and the East Asia Summit meeting. He has a near-perfect attendance record at these meetings; George W. Bush and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, were regularly no-shows.
The Obama administration’s cultivation of ties with Southeast Asia sets it apart from previous administrations, Democratic and Republican, which have tended to place China at the fulcrum of their Asia policies.
In Vientiane, the capital, Obama toured a U.S.-funded center that searches for explosives in the countryside and that provides prosthetic legs and rehabilitation services to victims of ones that have gone off.