Obama’s Valedictory Tour, from West to East

US President Barack Obama is on his final tour abroad. He has traveled to Europe and then will go to Peru to attend one last Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. The order of the journey may not be as significant as the juxtaposition it suggests. For there has not been a pivot to Asia to the degree that Obama may have liked, and Europe remains far less stable than anyone may have imagined eight years ago. Yet the two regions offer an important insight into Obama’s legacy, especially when it comes to geopolitics. In a little-noticed speech at Hannover last spring, Obama said many of the things Europeans have long been waiting to hear: that the United States still has an important stake in European integration and the extent to which it underwrites Western peace, stability and prosperity. His speeches in Asia have attracted more notice, especially during his visit to Hiroshima earlier this year. He said his visit there was not so much about the past as it was about the future. But what future, exactly? The future of Europe has been synonymous for several decades with the idea of a continent “whole and free.” Does this concept, which was once well known as “collective security,” make sense for any part of Asia? If so, how could it happen? How could it be sold? The problem is that there is no equivalent tradition of collective security in much of Asia. European integration borrowed from a collective memory of the Congress of Europe, and a vague but powerful notion of Western Civilization. Confucian, Islamic and other collective identities notwithstanding, this exists nowhere to the same cohesive degree in Asia. It is not up to Obama or any other individual to manufacture such a concept for other regions, or even to urge them to do so. But outsiders, especially Westerners, may still reaffirm their own conviction to collective security by leading by example. For even the most divided, violent regions can come together in peace and prosperity. A belief in Western Civilization did not prevent the European cataclysm from 1914-45. And it has not guaranteed a Europe Whole and Free after 1989. What did help Europe, however, was a shift in attitude in the mid-20th century which held that collective security need not undercut or vitiate a balance of power, but rather could be underwritten by one. What some scholars today call a strategy of “offshore balancing” was an operational means to an end, therefore, and not a strategic end in itself. The British were skilled at offshore balancing in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but the approach failed in the 20^th. There is not much of a chance for America playing a similar role, least of all in Asia, without incurring enormous risks, namely a much bigger conflict with China or with a Chinese-led alliance. As for the Middle East, such a role failed long ago. Obama has done all he can to limit the US liability and responsibilities in that part of the world, and has not hesitated to say so. Whether American neglect of the realities of power in the Middle East and an overcompensation in East Asia can bring about the type of security community that US diplomacy did so much to advance in Europe after 1945 remains to be seen. It has not helped that the US is in the process of reducing its interest in Europe as well, the Hannover speech notwithstanding, and even appearing, if the rhetoric of some politicians is to be believed, to disabuse the very idea and institutional instruments of collective security. For a man who has called himself the first Pacific President and the first who will probably live out the majority of his adulthood in the 21^st century, a useful reminder of a noble concept from the previous century—collective security—would be in order. Especially now that, even in its Euro-Atlantic heartland, it is going the way of the dodo.   About the author: Kenneth Weisbrode is a writer and historian. His latest book is The Year of Indecision, 1946.