Diminished US influence apparent

Barack Obama is nearing the end of his tour of four Asian countries (India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan); and as you might expect, he has had a full foreign-policy agenda. Relations between Japan and China have deteriorated sharply following the Japanese seizure of a Chinese fishing boat. South Korea, another stalwart American client, has much to fear from the political transitions of its mysterious neighbour.

India and Indonesia also present some complex strategic challenges. The dispute in Kashmir, which Obama identified as among his "critical tasks" in 2008, clearly saps Pakistan's commitment to America's war in Afghanistan. After two cancelled trips to Indonesia, Obama finally had the chance to commemorate his childhood in the country, and to re-engage his audience in the Muslim world that he first addressed in Cairo in 2009.

However, Obama insists on defining his mission in Asia in less than lofty terms. "We need to find," he wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times, "new customers in new markets for American-made goods." This article, which went on about trade pacts with South Korea, Indonesia's chairmanship of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean), and the importance of creating thousands of American jobs, had not a word to say about the political and military role of the United States in Asia.

While visiting India, Obama remained on message, talking about business deals and American jobs. He may be feeling a bit chastened after the setbacks in US midterm elections. Certainly he must stem growing unemployment as well as stimulate an economic recovery if he hopes to win a second term as president in 2012. And he may be trying to avoid the impression of being too preoccupied with abstruse foreign policy issues.

New reality

Still, Obama's diffidence acknowledges an undeniable fact: that America, weakened by the recession and successive military-diplomatic failures, can no longer dictate the course of events in Asia.

The oft-repeated story of China's rise is only part of the explanation for this. More importantly, mass politicisation and economic regionalism have emboldened many Asian countries that previously followed America's lead or cowered in its long shadow.

There is probably no American politician more aware of this impalpable but dramatic turnaround than Obama, who lived on a mud lane in Jakarta in the late 1960s, and visited Pakistan and India as a student in 1981. He came of age when the United States still wore the mantle it had inherited from European empires in the east.

Almost everywhere in Asia, the United States now finds itself distrusted, outmanoeuvred and encircled, by present allies as well as erstwhile proteges. Decades after getting rid of the shah, Iran's rulers can still draw upon strong anti-western passions as it bankrolls its proxies and friends in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Lebanon and Gaza. The politicians and businessmen of Japan and South Korea can barely keep a lid on mass opposition to America's lingering cold war presence in the region. Malaysia, from where I write, consistently "looked east" for its economic growth in the last three decades. Here, the east Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 stigmatised American policies long before the "Washington consensus" received its final rites elsewhere.

The shrinking of American influence is apparent even in India, whose political and business elites adore US wealth and power with an embarrassing intensity.

As Obama will found out, India has many more likely and rewarding partners in booming Asia than in the recession-hit West.

All this sounds a planet away from those Tea-Partying Americans who think that the US can bomb its way out of any political and economic difficulties abroad. It now falls to Obama to advance their education; and he'll most likely fail in this thankless task. But it can't be said that this president, once a street kid in Jakarta, didn't try, or that he ever imagined he could hustle into form the new and intractable Asia.

Pankaj Mishra is author of Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tibet.