On trip to seal ties with Asia, trade policy threatens rift

Issue poses sticking point as Obama promotes greater U.S. economic influence

SINGAPORE -- Hours after declaring that China's growing economic muscle doesn't pose a threat, President Obama traveled Saturday night to this usually pro-American city-state to wrestle with another tricky issue: Is the United States itself the troublemaker?

In Asia on an eight-day tour to reassert U.S. influence in the world's most economically buoyant region, Obama came to Singapore from Tokyo for a gathering of 21 Pacific Rim nations, an annual event that this year has put some of America's own policies in the line of fire.

A chorus of complaints about U.S. trade policies largely drowned out grumbling over China's turbocharged export machine and threatened to put Obama on the defensive at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. China has ramped up its criticism in recent weeks of U.S. restrictions on imports. And in the hours before the president's arrival, leaders of Mexico, China and Russia broadly condemned protectionism.

Obama had planned to arrive in Singapore after dinner Saturday, but he changed his schedule at the last minute to attend a banquet of heads of state here. He arrived in time to eat and change into this year's official APEC attire, a high-collared linen shirt billed as "Asian fusion" by summit organizers.

On Sunday morning, Obama attended a hastily arranged breakfast meeting on climate change that attempted to lower expectations for a global summit on the issue in Copenhagen next month. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen flew in overnight to brief the heads of state.

Rasmussen said talks have not proceeded enough to anticipate a breakthrough. He recommended that the countries adopt a strategy that would treat Copenhagen as merely the first of two steps forward -- in order to actually achieve something at that meeting.

Since leaving Washington on Thursday, Obama has sought to show that he is more in synch with Asia than his predecessors, describing himself in Tokyo as "America's first Pacific president" because of his upbringing in Hawaii and time spent in Asia as a boy, when he lived with his American mother and Indonesian stepfather in Jakarta.

Hard economic facts, however, also have made Obama something of a Pacific supplicant. China is the United States' biggest creditor, holding more than $1 trillion of U.S. debt. And while the U.S. economy clambers slowly out of a deep slump triggered by last year's financial crisis, Asia has rebounded with vigor. Asian economies will grow by nearly 6 percent next year, compared with 1.5 percent for the United States, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The United States remains by far the world's biggest economy. Its gross domestic product is five times as large as China's. But momentum is clearly moving Asia's way. China's economy, surging this year by more than 8 percent, is expected to expand by 9 percent in 2010.

While in Tokyo, Obama underlined the region's importance to the economic well-being of the United States and said China's growth will help, not hurt, America's prospects. Endorsing free trade as the best engine of growth, he pledged to start negotiations over possible membership in an obscure trade pact known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But with other, far more significant trade accords -- including one with South Korea -- formally negotiated but stalled in Congress, there is skepticism that Obama's gesture will lead to much. Indeed, one of the main themes at this year's APEC conference is this: The United States talks a good game on free trade but too often lets politics interfere.

The bluntest criticism, made just a few hours before Obama's arrival in Singapore, came from Mexican President Felipe Calderón who accused the United States of moving "in the opposite sense of free trade." Chinese President Hu Jintao and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, in separate speeches, also assailed protectionism. They didn't finger the U.S. directly, but they pointed in Washington's direction.