Leon Hadar: America's Long-Delayed Pacific Century

Leon Hadar, a Washington-based journalist and global affairs analyst, is the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

When President Bill Clinton was hosting the Leaders Summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Seattle in 1993, the Middle East started to feel like old news. Resisting pressure to oust Saddam Hussein and to launch new military campaigns in the Middle East, Clinton promoted a trade-liberalization agenda in East Asia and tried to transform APEC from a "talking shop" into a pillar of an Asia-centric foreign policy.

But when President Barack Obama hosted the leaders of the APEC forum in Honolulu, Hawaii, close to two decades after the Seattle Summit, it felt like a diplomatic Groundhog Day, with U.S. officials insisting once again that the time has come to shift American global priorities from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, proclaiming the Obama administration’s vision of “America’s Pacific Century.”

That Obama, born and raised in Hawaii, America’s self-described “first Pacific president,” is hosting the APEC leaders meeting in one of America’s territorial possessions in the Pacific was meant to symbolize these changing U.S. priorities.

“The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action,” Hillary Clinton wrote in the November issue of Foreign Policy. She added: “Harnessing Asia's growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests and a key priority for President Obama.” Clinton stressed that America’s diplomatic and economic frontiers this century lie not in the Middle East or Europe but in Asia.

And so America once again embraces an outlook that was front and center in the Bill Clinton years...