Obama Shifts U.S. Toward Asia

President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Australia highlighted, in a very deliberate way, a decision to shift U.S. attention and resources away from the Middle East and toward East Asia. Obama’s remarks to the Australian Parliament, combined with his announcement of a new basing agreement at Darwin, on Australia’s northern coast, framed several days of discussions on the role that the United States would play in Asian power politics. Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute of International Politics, an Australian foreign policy think tank, suggested that Obama’s speech in Canberra was as important and consequential as the Cairo speech of 2009. Of course, the speech itself is only worth as much as the underlying changes in policy that follow. In concrete terms, what does it mean when Obama that, “as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future”? And how will we know that the United States is following through on this commitment?