Let's Go: Asia, the presidential edition

When an American president travels abroad, you can count on three things: red carpets, long speeches and Washington think tank reports outlining the agenda for the trip.

On that final score, President Obama's visit to Asia this week and last hardly disappoints. All the major think tanks have inundated e-mail inboxes around town with briefing papers, Q&As and op-eds offering their advice. A look at them reveals three challenges that the experts think Obama must tackle.

First, Obama has to show Asia that the United States is still top dog in the region (or, more kindly, that Washington "remains engaged" with Asia). Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says Asians believe China's influence is rising while America's is waning. He blames "neglect or missteps" by Democratic as well as Republican administrations. The United States did not do enough to shore up Asia's financial system after the economic crisis of 1997-98, Pei writes, while the Bush administration later blew off several regional meetings.

Second, Obama will have to assure Asia that he really is a free-market guy. "There's a tendency for Asians to be suspicious of Democrats on trade issues," said Marcus Noland of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He added that while Asian leaders believe they've benefited from the open trading system Washington has promoted, they worry "about a kind of 'diminished giant' syndrome," in which the United States loses its commitment to open markets.

Finally, defining some principles for the U.S.-Chinese relationship would help, argue Cheng Li and Jordan Lee of the Brookings Institution. "China's model of state capitalism appears to have weathered a series of financial storms better than democratic capitalism," they write in Foreign Policy magazine, "and the United States now struggles with the question of how to engage this hybrid authoritarian-capitalist state."

Whatever you hope from the trip, don't expect the emergence of a G-2, that mythical, American-Sino alliance. The consensus is that both sides hate the concept: the Chinese because it saddles them with more responsibilities, and the Americans because it would tick off other allies. "I think there'll be no mention of it whatsoever on this trip," said the Peterson Institute's Nicholas Lardy.

-- Carlos Lozada