Shortage of experts blamed for Obama’s ‘reactive’ China policy

WASHINGTON — Three years after United States President Barack Obama vowed to shift his focus towards Asia in response to China’s growing power, the advisers who set that policy in motion are gone. So is their expertise.

Instead of the Treasury Secretary who had studied Mandarin as a college student in Beijing and was seen by a Politburo member as a family friend, Mr Obama has a budget expert heading the department. While the previous Secretary of State stressed the need for an Asia pivot, the nation’s top diplomat now has focused on a quest for Middle East peace. And the US Ambassador in Beijing has said he is no real expert on China.

As a result, former policymakers in both parties have said, the US is reacting to events rather than shaping them in the face of an increasingly assertive China.

“The administration was heavy on China people in the first few years and now, we seem to be completely devoid of them,” said Mr Jon Huntsman, who served as Ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011 and speaks Chinese. “I think the President has assessed that there’s no political up-side to managing the relationship beyond just the status quo.”

For Mr Obama, who landed in Beijing yesterday for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, it is a bad time to have a thin bench. Chinese President Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader in a quarter century, is changing China’s behaviour at home and abroad with a difficult-to-fathom impact on the US.

Washington lacks a credible response to the rise of China, said former US Ambassador Chas Freeman, 71, who served as President Richard Nixon’s interpreter during his groundbreaking 1972 trip to China. “We’re not dealing effectively with the consequences of China’s gradual displacement of us at the centre of the global economy.”

Administration officials reject the criticism, saying they are fully engaged and that Mr Obama has spent more time with China’s leaders than any US President since the normalisation of relations in 1979. Secretary of State John Kerry last week labelled the Sino-US relationship the most consequential in the world.

Still, Mr Freeman and other critics talk of policy drift, with some laying the blame on Obama’s advisers.

“The China team is weak,” said Mr Douglas Paal, 67, who was a US diplomat in Taiwan under President George W Bush. “The US is not well-structured right now to bring together all the strengths it could in dealing with China.”

Some of the erosion of China expertise came from the departure of senior presidential aides. Mrs Hillary Clinton, who first voiced the concept of the Asia pivot in 2011 as Secretary of State, signalled her commitment by making her first trip as the top US diplomat to Asia. At the US Embassy in Beijing, Mr Huntsman has been replaced by former Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who was active on China trade issues as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but who has little direct experience in China.

The White House lacks a senior figure whom the Chinese regard as a direct channel to the President for serious concerns, said both Republican and Democratic China specialists.

Starting with Mr Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration, a senior figure has usually operated as a conduit between American and Chinese leaders. “The Chinese have felt for some time that they don’t have a go-to person in this administration, somebody who they feel really understands China,” said Ms Bonnie Glaser, an analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. BLOOMBERG