Obama takes a detour to reconnect with 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 villas.
Strolling shoeless under the sloped roofs of a Buddhist monastery, Wat Xieng Thong; shopping for paper lanterns; drinking from a coconut with a straw while peering at the boats on the Mekong River, Obama savored a tropical afternoon that he said reminded him of his early childhood in Indonesia.
“It’s very familiar to me,” Obama said at a townhall-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 ancient 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 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 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.