Another Shutdown Victim: U.S. Efforts to Offset China

In the struggle for influence in the region, a dysfunctional Washington plays to the advantage of Beijing

By MARK LANDLER

President Obama canceled part of a visit to Asia, and may be forced to send Secretary of State John Kerry for the rest of it.

WASHINGTON — Debate over the federal government shutdown has tended to focus on those it hurts: veterans, tourists barred from the Lincoln Memorial and Yellowstone National Park, and giant-panda enthusiasts deprived of their publicly funded panda cam.
But the shutdown has already produced at least one winner: China.
By forcing President Obama to cancel a visit next week to Malaysia and the Philippines, the impasse with House Republicans is spoiling Mr. Obama’s show of support for two Southeast Asian countries that have long labored under the shadow of China. 

And it is undermining his broader effort to put Asia at the heart of American foreign policy.
Mr. Obama’s planned itinerary for next week — a mix of summit meetings and good-will visits — was carefully molded to reinforce the message to China that the United States is once again a central player in the region. 

But the president’s Asian pivot keeps getting pulled back by two forces that have haunted his presidency: strife in the Middle East and strife with Capitol Hill.
For now, the White House is clinging to the two remaining stops on Mr. Obama’s tour: a Pacific Rim economic summit meeting in Indonesia, at which he hopes to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and the East Asia Summit, in the sultanate of Brunei, where he is scheduled to meet the new prime minister of China, Li Keqiang.
With little sign of a compromise that would reopen the government by this weekend, however, Mr. Obama may be forced to scrap those visits, too, sending Secretary of State John Kerry as his understudy. 

It would be the third time he has been forced to sacrifice an Asia trip because of domestic issues — he postponed a visit in March 2010 because of the battle over the health care overhaul, and delayed it again four months later because of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Diplomatically, it’s very harmful,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a top China adviser during the Clinton administration. 

“I’m sure there are some in China who say, insofar as the U.S. pivot has China as its bull’s-eye, this prevents them from hitting that bull’s-eye.”
Jeffrey A. Bader, who was Mr. Obama’s senior adviser on China until 2011, said the White House’s attempt to salvage the two meetings, even amid the chaos of the shutdown, was an important sign that it remained committed to the region. 

But he added, “The mayhem that compelled the decision sends an unfortunate signal to those countries that the U.S. is far away, and that the U.S. political system is dysfunctional.”
While Mr. Obama’s plans are in flux, President Xi Jinping of China has embarked on a tour of Southeast Asia that will take him to Indonesia and Malaysia.
China, with its expansionist impulses, is a clear beneficiary of a distracted United States. 

It has clashed with Malaysia and the Philippines over claims to rocky outposts in the South China Sea, which the three countries border. 

On previous visits, Mr. Obama said the United States wanted to resolve these disputes peacefully and keep sea lanes open.
The president has invested in the Philippines and Malaysia for different reasons.
The Philippines is a treaty ally of the United States, and the administration has tried to shore up its Asian alliances, in part as a counterweight to the muscular role of China.
Malaysia went through a strained period with the United States in the 1990s under a xenophobic leader, Mahathir Mohamad. 

But relations have thawed under a new leader, Najib Razak, and Malaysia is a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a nascent regional trade bloc that is the economic pillar of Mr. Obama’s Asia strategy.
The administration wants to wrap up negotiations on a trade deal by the end of this year, a goal few analysts believe it can achieve. 

That may be even more elusive if Mr. Obama cannot personally offer his public backing at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, on the Indonesian island of Bali.
Critics have long charged that the “pivot” is more talk than reality — a fledgling trade deal and the deployment of 2,500 Marines to the Australian outback, rather than a genuine shift of resources. Administration officials say that contention is unfair, noting that in addition to the trade talks and alliance building, Mr. Obama spent hours one on one with Mr. Xi in Southern California in June.
Still, the turmoil in Syria has reinforced the reality that the Middle East is likely to remain a preoccupation for Mr. Obama. 

In his speech at the United Nations last week, he mentioned Asia in a single line, noting that it could serve as an economic example.
While the president may be no less committed to the region, there is a reduction of Asia expertise on his senior team. 

Mr. Kerry has made the Middle East, and particularly peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, his top priority, in contrast to his predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose first trip in the post was to Asia, and who led the drive to open diplomatic ties to Myanmar.
Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, has by necessity focused less on Asia than her predecessor, Tom Donilon, while Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew has far less experience in the region than his predecessor, Timothy F. Geithner. 

Administration officials counter that Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and the United States trade representative, Michael B. Froman, are both heavily involved in Asia.
But among top officials, only Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, whose history in Asia dates to his combat service in Vietnam, seems eager to put the rebalancing at the top of his agenda. 

Mr. Hagel, a former Republican senator, has been harshly critical of his fellow Republicans in the budget fight, telling reporters traveling with him to Japan and South Korea this week that “if this continues, we will have a country that is ungovernable.”
An ungovernable America is not something that the Chinese want either, given the economic interdependence of the two countries. 

But in the diplomatic struggle for influence in the region, a dysfunctional Washington plays to the short-term advantage of Beijing, especially with China having weathered its own domestic political upheavals.
“And,” added a senior administration official with bitter humor, “they still have a panda cam.”