US President Barack Obama insisted yesterday that the US was a “Pacific” power and vowed to deepen engagement in the region as he set foot in Asia for the first time as president.
“The United States will strengthen our alliances, build new partnerships and we will be part of multilateral efforts and regional institutions that advance regional security and prosperity,” he said in Tokyo as he launched his four-nation tour.
“The alliance between the United States and Japan is a foundation for security and prosperity, not just for our two countries, but for the Asian-Pacific region,” Obama said at a press conference alongside Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.
The US president’s trip, just over a year after he won election to the White House, is designed to shore up US power in a region increasingly dominated by rising giant China.
Obama leaves a clutch of domestic crises behind as he seeks to counter charges that US influence has frayed in Asia, with Washington distracted by its deep economic slump and the sapping wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Traveling without his wife, Obama will meet many regional leaders for the first time at the APEC summit in Singapore.
He will also become the first US president to sit down with all 10 leaders of ASEAN, including US foe Myanmar.
Obama will then head to China in the three-day center piece of his tour, with top global security issues, along with trade and currency differences, on the agenda, before wrapping up his trip in South Korea.
In Japan, where a new government took power two months ago, both sides are seeking to smooth over a row on US bases and stress shared goals on climate change, the war in Afghanistan and nuclear weapons.
Obama said he and Hatoyama had agreed to work together toward a nuclear-weapons-free world.
A visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cities bombed by the US in World War II, “is something that would be meaningful to me” during his presidency, he said.
Hatoyama, who, after ending half a century of conservative political domination, has vowed that Japan will be more assertive in its US alliance.
He has said he may scrap an unpopular plan to build a new US military base on Okinawa and that he would end a naval refueling mission that has since 2001 supported the US campaign in Afghanistan.
Japan’s top government spokesman, Hirofumi Hirano, said the summit would be “an opportunity to enhance relations in trust between our prime minister and the president. That’s our top priority. At the same time, we would like to reach concrete agreements. The environment and economic issues, as well as our long-term perspective for Japan-US relations, will be on the agenda.”
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