On upcoming trip, Obama will try to pivot to Asia again

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will leave Tuesday for a four-nation trip to Asia, looking to recharge a focus on the region, an ambitious initiative that’s been sidetracked by domestic politics and international conflicts elsewhere.

Yet even as Obama attempts to boost his effort to emphasize U.S. interest in Asia, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Ukraine is complicating efforts to reassure Asian nations — which share the region with an increasingly assertive China — that the U.S. is committed to their security.

The administration’s efforts to refocus U.S. policy toward Asia were already being questioned in the region with the departure of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who made Asia her first official overseas destination in 2009, and worries that a tight U.S. budget and continuing turmoil in the Middle East were proving too distracting for the administration.

Obama added to those worries last fall when he scrapped plans to attend two summits in Asia because of the federal government budget shutdown. Two of the stops on next week’s trip — Malaysia, where he’ll be the first U.S. president to visit since Lyndon Johnson, and the Philippines — had been on his itinerary last fall. He’ll start the trip with visits to U.S. allies Japan and South Korea.

Asia watchers said there was fear that the U.S. didn’t have the staying power and wouldn’t have the money to back up its claims of commitments to boost economic, security and diplomatic ties with Asia.

“In polite company people won’t say it, but behind closed doors I think they’ll openly ask where the pivot is. They don’t know where it is,” said Victor Cha, a senior adviser and Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research center.

Russia’s apparent success at slicing off Ukraine’s Crimea region without paying a significant cost raises fears about whether the U.S. would be reluctant to act if nations in the region faced similar aggression from their neighbors.

The trip comes as tensions in the region have mounted, with China rattling its neighbors in November by aggressively expanding its airspace to include contested waters between China and Japan.

Obama isn’t scheduled to visit China during this trip, but the country will loom large during the president’s four-nation tour of the region.