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'Obama will listen to Asia'

by JESUS F. LLANTO, abs-cbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak | 01/10/2009 8:16 PM

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Barack Obama’s multicultural background is expected to bring changes in the foreign policy of the United States, a US professor who specializes in Southeast Asia said.

Vincent Boudreau, professor and chair of the City College of New York's (CCNY) political science department, said that Obama’s background would result in a departure from the foreign policy of outgoing US President George Bush.

“He does not see other countries as small Americas training to be America,” Boudreau said Friday in a lecture at the University of the Philippines Asian Center in Quezon City.

Obama, will be sworn in as the 44th US president on January 20.  His late father was from Kenya while his late mother hailed from Kansas. Obama studied in Indonesia after his parents divorced and her mother married an Indonesian.  

“He spent his formative years in Indonesia and he has the perspective of Malaysia, Indonesia, and even the southern Philippines,” said Boudreau, author of "Resisting Dictatorship: Repression and Protest in Southeast Asia (2004)." The book deals with political transitions, social movements and democratization in Indonesia and the Philippines.

“He wants to come to Asia and he will listen to Asia,” Boudreau said, adding that he does not see that Obama will be telling Asians what to do.

Integrated US foreign policy

Boudreau, who is also the director of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at the City College of New York, said that unlike his predecessor, President Bush, who developed a foreign policy with “unprecedented autonomy from American society,” Obama will pursue policies that are more integrated with American domestic policies.

Established in 1997, the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies is a research center which seeks to "develop a new generation of publicly engaged leaders from populations previously underrepresented in policy circles and to bridge the academic and policymaking spheres through research and programming."

“Obama has a disposition to see US domestic policy and foreign policy embroiled with one another more than any other president,” Buodreau said.

Boudreau said in recent years, US has not been paying attention to Asia, and US foreign policy in the region focused only on two things: on places where domestic conflict is perpetuated by groups with links to Al-Qaeda, and on strong co-dependent relationship with China.

Pacific no longer a US lake

The focus on these two issues, Boudreau said, has diverted the attention of the US from some developments in the Asia, like the integration of countries in the region and the rise of massive military power in the East, particularly the naval forces of India and Japan.

“The Pacific Ocean now is not just an American lake,” Boudreau said.

The war on terror, Boudreau said, will be focused on Taliban and Afghanistan “He will take the war on terror more aggressively to the Taliban and expressed willingness to go to tribal areas in Pakistan.”

Obama has said during the campaign that he wanted to end the war in Iraq. He has also expressed interest in focusing efforts on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“Our strategy must also include sustained diplomacy to isolate the Taliban and more effective development programs that target aid to areas where the Taliban are making inroads,” Obama wrote in an article in the Foreign Affairs magazine in 2007.

Boudreau said that the first six months of Obama’s administration would be crucial because this is the time then when he would lay out his legislative agenda.