Obama's Indonesian trip: Biography big

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama's planned, and slightly delayed, trip to Indonesia marks an important step in relations with the Islamic world, says an expert on U.S.-Asian relations who served the Bush administration on this front.

" It is a critical and pivotal strategic country, not only in Asia but in the Islamic world and in the developing world,'' said Michael Green, a senior adviser and chairman of the Japan program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He served as an adviser to Bush's National Security Council.

"While the Clinton and Bush administrations invested in the Indonesia relationship, I think for U.S. foreign policy, it is a relationship that could do much more,'' Green said at a CSIS forum today on the president's upcoming trip to Guam, Australia and Indonesia - delayed until March 21 by the impending expected vote on healthcare in the House this week.

"Indonesia is a pivot in the Islamic world,'' Green said. "It is a successful example to both Asia that democratization can be successful and to the Islamic world that democratization can be successful. Indonesia has had direct presidential elections. Civil society in Indonesia, including NU and major Islamic organizations, have embraced democracy as a way to advance their agenda and to do it peacefully and within the constitutional provisions of the nation. So it's a success story for democracy - a lesson for the Islamic world, a lesson for countries like China in Asia.''

It's also a nation where Obama spent some time as a boy, schooled there for four years after his divorced mother remarried an Indonesian. Obama, born in Hawaii, returned there. And Obama's "biography'' will play a big role n this trip, Green suggested.

"For an American strategy aimed at keeping the U.S. fully engaged in Asia, Indonesia is a really important partner,'' Green said. "In many ways, I've heard people in the administration say that Indonesia will be for Obama what India was for Bush. It will be the big strategic relationship that they transform...

" They'll announce a... U.S.-Indonesia comprehensive partnership,'' he said. "The highlights are pretty thin, to be honest. And I think one of the deep concerns in the administration is that they're going on this trip and they don't have a lot of deliverables.... When you're in the summitry business... you want deliverables.... For a variety of reasons, this trip is... is going to be a bit thin on quote, unquote, "deliverables.'"

The two will agree on educational exchanges, including a "modest'' expansion of the U.S.-funded Fullbright scholars program. They will agree on military-to-military cooperation.

"They'd like to do more on economics, but unfortunately, I think the economic - bilateral economic agenda is going to be rather thin,'' Green said.

The big speeches, of course, call out for attention. How might the president's address in Indonesia be different from his address to the Muslim world from Cairo last year?

Obama will address a joint session of the parliament in Jakarta and perhaps another at an undisclosed location, said Victor Cha, another senior adviser at CSIS and chair of the Korea program who, like Green, advised the Bush admnistration's National Security Council.

"I get the sense - while we talk a lot about sort of the whole Muslim democracy thing -- I get the sense they're not trying to play that up on this trip,'' Cha said. "They're going to let the pictures speak for themselves. When you talk to folks who have been organizing this, they just don't seem to be playing - to be playing this up. I think they prefer to not, sort of, try to put that as the banner headline because you just never know how that's going to play.''

"This Cairo speech he gave was originally supposed to be given in Indonesia in March, I think, last year,'' Green said. "How much will they continue to talk about that theme? My sense is the intellectual case is going to be less compelling than the images of an African-American president who grew up in Indonesia and just the effect of that canceling out the anti-American message that others will try to convey.''