By Romesh Ratnesar
Business Week
Business Week
President Obama and Vice President Biden order lunch at Taylor Gourmet Deli in Washington on Oct. 4. (Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
By canceling a planned trip to Asia next week, President Obama might have thought he’d sidestepped a potential political minefield. Republicans would undoubtedly have howled at the sight of the president skipping town in the midst of a government shutdown. Some of them are howling anyway. “The White House planning staff would have (or should have) seen this collision of deadlines coming months ago,” wrote conservative columnist Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal. “Foreign relations suffer so Mr. Obama can pummel the GOP.”
In the eyes of much of the American public, Obama still has the upper hand over House Speaker John Boehner in the battle to be blamed less for the shutdown. But no matter when and how the budget crisis is resolved, Obama’s stature overseas will be diminished. It’s not just that, as Josh Kurlantzick argued here earlier this week, he’s lost the opportunity to make an in-person push for a trans-Pacific free-trade agreement—an initiative once hailed as a major priority for his second term. Obama’s no-show at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Bali also marks the second straight year he’s opted not to attend the annual gathering of Asian leaders. The administration’s talked-about “pivot” to Asia has been exposed as a rhetorical wish more than a strategic reality.
Predictably, the U.S.’s absence from the Asian stage has been exploited by its biggest rival, China. While Obama shared sandwiches with furloughed federal workers, Chinese President Xi Jinping became the first foreign leader to address Indonesia’s parliament. As the New York Times reports, Xi plans to use the APEC meeting to make the case for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, Beijing’s alternative to the U.S.’s Trans-Pacific Partnership. “He is winning hearts and minds in the right places,” Endy Bayuni, senior editor of the Jakarta Post, told the Times.
The shutdown is also damaging the administration’s efforts to negotiate a deal with Iran over its nuclear program. U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that with so many staffers on forced furlough, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, “along with our own sanctions monitoring group, has been completely, virtually, utterly depleted in this time.” Meanwhile, the “intelligence community, which we rely on for intelligence information to go after sanctions evaders and sanctions … has been devastated as well.”
The economic bite caused by the West’s sanctions against Iran has been the single biggest factor in pushing Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to the negotiating table. If those sanctions start to weaken, so will the U.S.’s leverage and Rouhani’s incentive to compromise.
Whether the budget crisis is resolved in the coming days, the continued spectacle of a dysfunctional, divided U.S. government plays into the hands of those inside Iran who believe they can use negotiations to buy time without conceding anything, knowing that Obama is unlikely to be able to win domestic support for a deal. “These guys have a very sophisticated understanding of American politics,” says Abbas Milani, an Iran expert at Stanford University. “They understand power very well and understand bluffs very well. They’ve been in leadership positions for 35 years. They’re seasoned politicians.” The longer the stalemate in Washington drags on, the better it is for America’s adversaries.
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RELATED STORY:
GOP tantrum carries international consequences
By Steve Benen
The Maddow Blog
The Maddow Blog
Chinese President Xi Jinping
I’d love to know if congressional Republicans understand developments like these, or consider the consequences important.
As President Obama made apologetic calls to Asia to cancel his planned trip, China’s leader, Xi Jinping was taking a star turn in some of the same countries Mr. Obama would have visited.
This week, Mr. Xi became the first foreigner to address the Indonesian Parliament, offering billions of dollars in trade to the country that was Mr. Obama’s childhood home. Mr. Xi then moved on to Malaysia, before preparing to attend two Asian summits that Mr. Obama had to abandon because of the government shutdown.
With the cancellation of the visits, the much-promoted but already anemic American “pivot” to Asia was further undercut, leaving allies in the region increasingly doubtful the United States will be a viable counterbalance to a rising China. [...]
That wariness, Asian officials and analysts say, is giving China a new edge in the tug-of-war between the two countries over influence in Asia, with the gravitational pull of China’s economy increasingly difficult to resist.
Richard Heydarian, a foreign policy adviser to the Philippine Congress and a lecturer in international affairs at Ateneo de Manila University in Manila, told the Times, “How can the United States be a reliable partner when President Obama can’t get his own house in order?”
Let that quote roll around in your brain for a moment.
International observers can’t be expected to appreciate the nuances of U.S. governmental structure, along with concepts such as separation of powers and co-equal branches of government. What people around the world know is more basic: the United States is a global superpower that can’t keep its lights on and is threatening to stop paying its own bills — not because it lacks the money, but because its legislative branch may decide it doesn’t feel like meeting its obligations anymore.
There’s a global competition underway for power and influence in the 21st century. Americans have rivals who are playing for keeps. We can either be at the top of our game or we can watch others catch up to our position.
And it’s against this backdrop that House Speaker John Boehner and his Republican colleagues shut down the government, threaten default, fight tooth and nail to strip Americans of their health care benefits, and keep spending levels so low we’re kicking children out of Head Start centers while our global competitors double down on education.
It’s as if some have a vision in which we no longer lead and we aim for second place on purpose.
President Obama was eager to travel to Asia to demonstrate U.S. support for the Philippines and Malaysia, while bolstering U.S. influence in Southeast Asia, but now he can’t — congressional Republicans aren’t done with their tantrum.
The world is laughing at us, wondering why our policymakers can no longer complete basic tasks, and lawmakers from one party just don’t seem to notice or care.
As I keep arguing, great nations can’t function the way we’re struggling to function now. The United States can either be a 21st-century superpower or it can tolerate Republicans abandoning the governing process and subjecting Americans to a series of self-imposed extortion crises.
It cannot do both.
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