[On
Wednesday, Mr. Obama announced that the United States planned to deploy 2,500 Marines in Australia to shore up alliances in Asia , but the move prompted a sharp response from Beijing , which accused Mr. Obama of escalating
military tensions in the region.]
By Jackie Calmes
Jason Reed/Reuters
|
“We are
deepening our alliance and this is the perfect place to do it,” said Mr. Obama,
speaking in a steamy air force hangar to about 2,000 people, mostly Australian
troops in green camouflage uniforms but with 55 American Marines salted among
them. “This region has some of the busiest sea lanes in the world.”
On
Wednesday, Mr. Obama announced that the United States planned to deploy 2,500 Marines in Australia to shore up alliances in Asia , but the
move prompted a sharp response from Beijing , which accused Mr. Obama of escalating military tensions
in the region.
The
agreement with Australia amounts to the first long-term expansion of the American
military’s presence in the Pacific since the end of the Vietnam War. It comes
despite budget cuts facing the Pentagon and an increasingly worried reaction
from Chinese leaders, who have argued that the United States is seeking to encircle China militarily and economically.
“It may not
be quite appropriate to intensify and expand military alliances and may not be
in the interest of countries within this region,” Liu Weimin, a Foreign
Ministry spokesman, said in response to the announcement by Mr. Obama and Prime
Minister Julia Gillard of Australia.
In an
address to the Australian Parliament on Thursday morning, Mr. Obama said he had
“made a deliberate and strategic decision — as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this
region and its future.”
The
president said the moves were not intended to isolate China , but they were an unmistakable sign that the United States had grown warier of its intentions.
While the
new military commitment is relatively modest, Mr. Obama has promoted it as the
cornerstone of a strategy to confront more directly the challenge posed by China ’s rapid advance as an economic and military power. He has
also made some progress in creating a new Pacific free-trade zone that would
give America ’s free-market allies in the region some trading privileges
that do not immediately extend to China .
Mr. Obama
described the deployment as responding to the wishes of democratic allies in
the region, from Japan to India . Some allies have expressed concerns that the United States , facing war fatigue and a slackened economy, will cede its
leadership role to China .
The
president said budget-cutting in Washington — and the inevitable squeeze on military spending — would
not inhibit his ability to follow through. Defense cuts “will not — I repeat,
will not — come at the expense of the Asia-Pacific,” he said.
Some
analysts in China and elsewhere say they fear that the moves could backfire,
risking a cold war-style standoff with China .
“I don’t
think they’re going to be very happy,” said Mark Valencia, a Hawaii-based
senior researcher at the National Bureau of Asian Research, who said the new
policy was months in the making. “I’m not optimistic in the long run as to how
this is going to wind up.”
The United States will not build new bases on the continent, but will use
Australian facilities instead. Mr. Obama said that Marines would rotate through
for joint training and exercises with Australians, and the American Air Force
would have increased access to airfields in the nation’s Northern Territory .
“We’re
going to be in a position to more effectively strengthen the security of both
of our nations and this region,” he said.
The United States has had military bases and large forces in Japan and South Korea , in the north Pacific, since the end of World War II, but
its presence in Southeast Asia was greatly diminished in the early 1990s with the closing
of major bases in the Philippines , at Clark Field and Subic Bay .
The new arrangement with Australia will restore a substantial American footprint near the South China Sea ,
a major commercial route — including for American exports — that has been
roiled by China ’s disputed claims of control.
The United States and other Pacific
Rim nations are also negotiating
to create a free-trade bloc, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that would not
initially include China ,
the world’s largest exporter and producer of manufactured goods.
The
tentative trade agreement was a topic over the weekend in Honolulu , where Mr. Obama hosted the annual Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation forum, and it will be discussed again in Bali , Indonesia , when he becomes the first American president to
participate in the East Asia Summit meeting.
For China , the week’s developments could suggest an economic and a
military encirclement. Top leaders did not immediately comment on Mr. Obama’s
speech, but Mr. Liu, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, emphasized that it was the
United States , not China , seeking to use military power to influence events in Asia .
The Global
Times, a state-run news organization known for its nationalist and bellicose
commentaries, issued a stronger reaction in an editorial, saying that Australia
should be cautious about allowing the United States to use bases there to “harm
China” and that it risked getting “caught in the cross-fire.”
Analysts
say that Chinese leaders have been caught off guard by what they view as an
American campaign to stir up discontent in the region. China may have miscalculated in recent years by restating
longstanding territorial claims that would give it broad sway over development
rights in the South China Sea , they say. But they argue that Beijing has not sought to project military power far beyond its
shores, and has repeatedly proposed to resolve territorial disputes through negotiations.
The United States portrays itself as responding to a new Chinese
assertiveness in the region that has alarmed core American allies. Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote a recent article in Foreign Policy laying
out an expansive case for American involvement in Asia , and
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta characterized China ’s military development as lacking transparency and
criticized its assertiveness in the regional waters.
Mr. Obama
reached out to China even as he announced the new troop deployment. “The notion
that we fear China is mistaken; the notion that we are looking to exclude China is mistaken,” he said.
The
president said that China would be welcomed into the new trade pact if Beijing was willing to meet the free-trade standards for
membership. But such standards would require China to let its currency rise in
value, to better protect foreign producers’ intellectual property rights and to
limit or end subsidies to state-owned companies, all of which would require a
major overhaul of China’s economic development strategy.
On
Thursday, Mr. Obama praised the long chain of alliance between Australia and the United States . Indeed, the mix of Australian troops and American Marines
represented the latest in a line of comrades-in-arms from the two countries
dating back nearly a century, from World War I through Iraq and Afghanistan .
“It was
here in Darwin where our alliance was born,” Mr. Obama said, at “Australia ’s Pearl Harbor ” — a nickname derived from the town’s having been
devastated in bombing attacks by the Japanese in 1942, just months after the Pearl Harbor
attack.
Ms.
Gillard also joined Mr. Obama here to commemorate the 60th anniversary of their
nations’ official alliance. Before appearing at the base, he and Ms. Gillard
laid wreaths at the memorial to the U.S.S. Peary, which was sunk with 80 of its
crew when Darwin was bombed in 1942.
After
speaking at the Australian military base, Mr. Obama arrived in Bali on
Thursday evening for the East Asia Summit on regional security and economic
issues.