It won't be mistaken for a Nixon-goes-to-China kind of moment.
But President Barack
Obama's visit to Myanmar on Monday sometimes felt like a return to an
earlier era of presidential diplomacy - and his aides were determined to
make sure that no one missed its historic significance.
The trip was carefully
choreographed to highlight what the White House sees as a first-term
foreign policy success for a newly re-elected president whose record on
the world stage shows few triumphs so far.
There was the cautious
first meeting with reformist President Thein Sein to keep him on track,
landmark talks with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and a speech to
the Burmese people at a university steeped in the country's turbulent
political history.
But there were also a few
unscripted parts that underscored how strange it was for Obama to be
feted by cheering crowds lining the streets of Yangon little more than a
year after ordering aides to explore rapprochement with the
long-shunned Southeast Asian country after decades of military rule.
On the fly, Obama decided
to make an unscheduled stop at the Shwedagon Pagoda, where he, Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton and their entire entourage went barefoot as
part of Buddhist tradition at the revered shrine.
Even Obama's Secret
Service agents were left scurrying shoeless and sockless, talking
quietly into their radios, as they secured the area.
The road to Suu Kyi's
lakeside villa, where she was kept under house arrest by the country's
military rulers for much of two decades until her release in 2010, took
Obama through a decaying but bustling city still bearing the marks of
its British colonial past.
Strangely, Obama - in his
statement to reporters after their meeting in which he hailed Suu Kyi
for her heroism - mispronounced her name at least twice. And there was
another awkward moment at the end when he embraced and kissed the devout
Buddhist, leaving her visibly uncomfortable.
Obama also took a
linguistic leap when - after his talks with Thein Sein - he referred,
once, to the country as Myanmar, the name the former ruling junta
changed to years ago. Obama aide Ben Rhodes said it was done as a
"diplomatic courtesy" and that U.S. government policy was still to refer
to it as Burma.
TIME WARP
At times, it felt like the White House and its sometimes-pampered press corps had stepped into a time warp.
Cellphones and BlackBerrys
usually humming at all hours back in Washington went strangely silent
for the most part in Myanmar, where sanctions that have only recently
been eased have kept mobile telecommunications from developing very far.
Obama's six-hour visit -
part of a three-country Asian tour - had been in the planning stages for
months, a trip he would have taken, win or lose the November 6
election.
The fact that he won gave him a chance to tout his success in
pushing Myanmar's generals onto the path of democratic reform as he
starts to build a presidential legacy.
He went ahead despite objections from international human
rights groups that it was too soon, despite a looming fiscal showdown in
Washington, despite the eruption of an Israel-Hamas conflict in the
Gaza Strip.
The visit was part of a shift in the U.S. strategic focus -
the so-called "Asia pivot" - by which Washington aims to advance
diplomatic and economic relations in the region, in part to counter
China's rising influence.
But it was also a chance
for Obama, America's first black president who has met historians and
scholars to ponder the historical dimensions of his tenure, to make a
bit of history.
The visit, in some ways,
brought Obama full circle from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech
in 2009 when he spoke of "repression in Burma" in the same breath as
"genocide in Darfur" and "systematic rape in Congo".
How big of a moment it is
historically is open for debate. After all, British Prime Minister David
Cameron, South Korea President Lee Myung-bak and Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh had already visited.
It certainly won't rank up
there with the breakthrough that President Richard Nixon scored with
his visit to communist China in 1972 that ended decades of estrangement
between Washington and Beijing.
But if the reforms stick, Obama can expect high marks for the opening to Myanmar.
It is a country where democratic processes are so new that
Clinton, during her visit last year, was told that lawmakers were trying
to teach themselves how to behave by watching old episodes of "The West
Wing," a fictional U.S. television series about presidential politics.
As he wrapped up his trip,
Obama gave his own civics lesson, telling an attentive but politely
quiet audience at Yangon University how Congress acts as a check and
balance on his presidential power.
"As President, I cannot just impose my will on Congress," he said. "... even though sometimes I wish I could."
Post a Comment