Obama heading to Chinese economic summit

Hamstrung by a disastrous midterm election, President Obama departed the U.S. on Sunday for crucial meetings in Asia with world leaders who now view him as a very lame duck in Beijing.

Mr. Obama arrives in China Monday for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, followed by a state visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. From there, he’ll travel to Myanmar and to Australia for another summit.

Chinese officials have been restrained publicly in their comments about the GOP’s landslide last week, but their state-run media was blistering in its criticism of Mr. Obama’s leadership.

“Obama always utters, ’Yes, we can,’ which led to the high expectations people had for him. But he has done an insipid job, offering nearly nothing to his supporters,” said the Global Times, published by China’s state-run People’s Daily. “U.S. society has grown tired of his banality.”

It said “the lame-duck president will be further crippled” by the Republicans’ victory, which included a takeover of the Senate.

Specialists on U.S.-Asia relations said world leaders at the summits have fresh doubts about Mr. Obama and the staying power of his oft-proclaimed “pivot” to Asia.

“They’re wondering, who is Barack Obama now after the midterm elections?” said Ernest Bower, senior adviser for Southeast Asia studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “They’ll be trying to discern whether he has the commitment and political capability, [the] political capital to follow through on earlier commitments. This is going to be a tough trip for the president.”

Asked about concerns that Mr. Obama can’t deliver on his international promises, White House National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice responded, “Quite the opposite.”

“If you actually are engaged in the dialogues that I am [having] with our partners in the region, you’ll hear them say that they recognize that the United States is making an unprecedented commitment to the Asia-Pacific region,” she said Friday. “The fact that we are engaged in a very energetic and constructive way in the Asia-Pacific region and are there talking about some of the global challenges that we all share just shows how integral the Asia-Pacific region is not only to our prosperity but to our national security as well as global security.”

The most glaring of Mr. Obama’s unmet goals is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact that would include 12 Pacific Rim nations encompassing about 40 percent of the world’s trade. The president initially wanted to complete the agreement by the end of 2013, but now administration officials say it’s unlikely to get done on this trip either.

Negotiators have conducted 20 rounds of formal talks on the pact since March 2010. Ms. Rice and other administration officials describe the agreement as nearly completed. But Japan in particular is still holding out in negotiations with the U.S., and analysts say the president’s losses in the midterm elections have raised another question mark about the president’s ability to deliver.

“There has to be some sense, in Japan, in particular, that [the] Republican Congress is on board, or we’re going to very possibly be stuck where we are,” said Michael Green, chair of the Japan program at CSIS.

Republican lawmakers have been mostly supportive of the trade deal, while Democrats beholden to organized labor oppose giving the president “fast-track” trade promotion authority to push the pact through Congress without changes. Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada was particularly outspoken in his opposition to the deal.

TPP was on the agenda when Mr. Obama met Friday at the White House with congressional leaders, including incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican.

“Most of [Mr. Obama’s] party is unenthusiastic about international trade,” Mr. McConnell said after the election. “We think it’s good for America.”

Environmental groups are vowing to oppose any efforts of Mr. Obama to work with the GOP on trade promotion authority.

“President Obama would be naive to believe that cooperation with Senator McConnell and Speaker Boehner will ultimately [result in] a TPP deal,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth. “Fast-track bills written by the Republican leadership and the U.S. Trade Representative Mike Froman have cut Democrats out of the process and have alienated even pro-trade Democrats. President Obama’s attempt to fast-track the TPP also is inconsistent with his claims to be an environmental champion.”

The Republic of China, also known as Taiwan, will be watching to see whether Mr. Obama discusses the Taiwan Relations Act with Mr. Xi as a sign of support for democratic Taipei.

Lyushun Shen, Taipei’s representative in the U.S., noted that Taiwan is one of the largest trading partners of the U.S. and said it also wants to be included in the TPP.

“Taiwan is the largest external investor in mainland China,” Mr. Shen said. “We know them better than anybody else. I tell my American friends, ’This is your diplomatic asset. We are siding with you in your rebalancing Asia strategy.’ So don’t ignore us in the TPP.”

Human rights will also be on Mr. Obama’s agenda in China and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Ms. Rice said she expects Mr. Obama to raise the subject of China’s harsh treatment of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, as well as “other aspects of human rights and civil liberties in China.”

In Australia, the president will participate in a G-20 summit where the focus will be on economic growth, with economies in Europe and elsewhere in danger of falling back into a recession.

Mr. Obama got some good news on that front on Friday, when the Labor Department reported solid growth in the U.S. in October, with 214,000 jobs added and the unemployment rate dropping a notch to 5.8 percent.

“I’m going to be able to say that we’ve actually created more jobs here in the United States than every other advanced country combined,” Mr. Obama told reporters Friday. “And they notice that we’re doing something right here.”