 Good morning and welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I'm Andrew Schwartz, Vice President of External Relations here at CSIS. And I'm joined by two of my colleagues, Doctors Michael Green and Victor Cha. And I just want to apologize in advance for bringing such lightweights on the issue of Asia to this briefing, but now we're very fortunate to have two of the world's leading experts on Asia, both of who served in the former administration at the highest level of policymaking. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Dr. Mike Green, who will give you a sort of a scene-setter as to what's happening. Thanks. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, everyone. Victor and I both worked in the NSC and planned trips like the one the President's about to take and have enormous sympathy for our successors who are putting together this trip to Indonesia, Australia, and Guam, especially since it got delayed, which if you're the guy in the front lines dealing with these governments and trying to reschedule everything is no picnic, and I imagine they're pretty busy and are pulling it all together quite professionally. That trip was originally, of course, supposed to take place earlier during the spring break at Sidwell Friends so that the President could bring his family. And it was delayed, of course, because of the health care debate to March 18th, and so his family won't be going. Spring break is over. The kids have to go back to school. As a dad, I'm completely sympathetic with that, too. Indonesia is, in some ways, the highlight of this trip with all respect to our friends in Australia. Australians, I think, would be quite pleased that the President is paying so much attention to Indonesia. It is a critical and pivotal strategic country, not only in Asia but in the Islamic world and in the developing world. And while the Clinton and Bush administrations invested in the Indonesia relationship, I think for U.S. farm policy it is a relationship that could do much more. This is a pivot in the Islamic world. 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 and Asia. Indonesia has also been successful in the war on terror. Just last week they killed one of the terrorists responsible for the bombings at the Marriott Hotel. I remember in 2001 and early 2002, after 9-11, in the White House, there were real questions about whether Indonesia might end up being the next Afghanistan. And instead what has happened is the country has successfully held democratic elections, has built a credible counterterrorism capability, and has actually rolled back Jamiah Slami and other threats in the country. Indonesia is also important in this larger question of East Asian integration and architecture. Indonesia is the largest country in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Now a member of the G20, founding member of APEC. So for an American strategy aimed at keeping the U.S. fully engaged in Asia, Indonesia is a really important partner. 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. And they come into the trip with a pretty ambitious agenda, at least initially, and I'll get back to why I say initially in a moment. They'll announce a comprehensive, a U.S.-Indonesia comprehensive partnership. 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. And when you're in the summitry business, as Victor and I were, you want deliverables. You want agreements, you want breakthroughs, you want to use the President's trip to justify leaving Washington, to show the importance of the relationship through a series of concrete items. And for a variety of reasons, this trip is not, is going to be a bit thin on, quote, unquote, deliverables. They will have an agreement on educational exchange to modestly expand the full-bite program. They are working on a very important agreement to expand military to military cooperation and education. The problem there is that Senator Leahy has held up mill-to-mill exchange because he doesn't want to include Kopasas. Kopasas is the Indonesian special forces, the Green Beret. And in the past, they've been involved in some pretty bad activities. So the administration is working still, I think, and it will probably go right down to the wire trying to convince Senator Leahy to allow them to expand some military to military cooperation that would include Kopasas. And they'll probably have to compromise by sort of getting younger officers who were brought into the force after some of the human rights violations. And Victor and I have both been sort of trying to take the pulse of this, in our sense, as they have not yet worked it out. If they can, that will be a big deliverable. They'd like to do more on economics, but unfortunately, I think the economic, bilateral economic agenda is going to be rather thin. Part of the problem is that the Indonesians themselves are just not ready and have not been able to step up and answer some of these deliverables. The Indonesian government has some capacity issues in foreign policy to begin with. It's a small foreign service. It's not been terribly active internationally. It's not been terribly active with the U.S. And there are even more handicapped now because President SBY, President Yudyono, is embroiled in this scandal, this controversy over a bank century. Which is a bank which was involved in some questionable dealings, ran into trouble. There were charges that it was giving money to Yudyono's political lieutenants. They ran into financial trouble and the government offered a bailout of the bank in the context of the current financial crisis. And the problem is that the bailout was approved by Yudyono's vice president and some of the major economic reformers. Precisely the sort of economic reformers who would be working with the U.S. to have a successful agenda for liberalizing the Indonesian economy, improving the environment for foreign direct investment. These same guys are implicated in this bailout of bank century. And the DPR, the parliament last week issued a ruling saying that the president and the administration were wrong to bail out the bank. So there's talk of impeachment, this huge scandal, SBY has become very cautious and his economic reformers are not able to mobilize the government to get agreements with the U.S. to open up investment and things. So the economic part is also a bit thin. We're also, frankly, on the U.S. side not terribly interesting right now in terms of trade strategy. The president hasn't advanced the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement in the Congress. We've said we're going to do the Trans-Pacific Partnership TPP, which, by the way, does not include Indonesia. It starts with four countries, Singapore, Brunei, Chile and New Zealand, expands to Vietnam and then we're in Australia is interested. Indonesia's not in it. So there isn't much on our side that we're bringing in terms of trade liberalization in Asia generally and there's not much we have on Indonesia. We can talk about that more if you like. So for a variety of reasons, some of it timing, some of it scandals Indonesia, some of it that we don't have a very ambitious trade strategy ourselves, the deliverables will be rather thin. And I think the White House is a bit worried about this. I would say, though, that this is one place, Indonesia, where the president's popularity really is an asset for the United States. I think that the administration overplayed the president's biography in the trip to China and as a result came up short. I think they've overplayed it elsewhere. But in Indonesia, President Obama is very, very popular and his own history in Indonesia means that just the fact of a trip is going to advance U.S. interests even if we don't get these deliverables. Briefly on Australia, it's the 70th anniversary of our diplomatic relationship. The Obama administration in many ways did not get the Asia it wanted. It wanted to continue building the U.S.-Japan alliance, but then it got the DPJ government in Japan. Very populist, very hard to work with. It wanted to expand and elevate U.S.-China relations beyond what Bush had done, but then it ran into an outwardly confident, almost arrogant China and an inwardly insecure China dealing with its own leadership succession in 2012. And if you saw Wen Jiabao's comments, you can see how difficult China is. So he's not gotten the Asia he wants. And in Indonesia, of course, the big hope for a transformed strategic relationship ran aground because of domestic problems in Indonesia. But he got lucky in two areas. Korea and Australia, with Im Young-Bak and with Kevin Rudd. And the U.S.-Australian alliance has really benefited from a kind of synchronicity of our political bio-rhythms. You had Bush and Howard, two like-minded conservatives at the same time. And then they both switched and you had two left of center multilateralist reformers in favor of aggressive policies on climate change, both very cerebral. So Rudd and Obama are actually very well configured for each other. They will talk about a range of issues. I'm sure they'll complain, but both of them have been stymied by their Senate, the Australian Senate and the U.S. Senate, by conservative opponents who've blocked health care reform and climate change. They have a very similar political set of headaches to each other. They have very similar views on climate change. Australia's been very helpful in the war on terror and in Afghanistan. The President won't get a significant increase in Australian troops for Afghanistan, I don't think he'll ask. The one area where there's a little bit of not disagreement but a different temperature is that Kevin Rudd is pushing this idea of an Asia-Pacific community. Australia's answer for the question of how you organize Asian architecture. And for the most part, the Obama administration's been kind of lukewarm about it. A little bit concerned that it might overshadow APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, which will be held in Japan and then next year in Hawaii. And I don't think the Obama administration wants anything to overcrowd that. And partly because there's a little bit of not invented here syndrome. If the U.S. government didn't think of the regional architecture, then we're not that interested. So one thing to watch on the Australia trip is how they talk about Kevin Rudd's Asia-Pacific community concept. The Australian press and some Australian observers are saying Obama and Ujjona will endorse Kevin Rudd's Asia-Pacific community concept, which is very vague by the way. But we'll see. It's sort of one of the things the Australian press will be watching. Guam is the last, there's the only other stop. And I think my guess is Guam is a refueling stop, frankly. On these trips, you always have to put Air Force One down to refuel. Usually you do it at a military base so that the president can meet with families and thank them, meet with the military officers. Guam's important strategically, but my guess is the stop is mostly to refuel. So that's a brief overview of the trip. The other place you could refuel is Japan, but that's not a very convenient place to stop these days, I guess. I think Mike covered a lot. Let me just add a couple of points. Mike sort of finished by saying how this was in the Asia that they didn't expect. The other way of looking at this is, they tried Asia one way in year one, and now they get a do-over, right? And they're doing it over again. The first year the focus was on China. China was, as the president said, in the speech in Japan in November, China was central to the US global agenda. China was really all out engagement, and that kind of didn't work out very well, right? And then the other area they were really focused on was opening the unclenched fist to countries like Cuba and in Asia, North Korea, right? And they got, in return for that, they got a missile test and they got a nuclear test, right? And then the unexpected thing they got was Japan, right? The domestic change in Japan, and a lot of the issues that came up there. So that was year one, and sort of year two now is the do-over year, right? They're trying it a different way. We can talk about this tensions with China arising over a number of issues. Clearly on North Korea, a very different track with sanctions, being the prominent aspect of the policy right now. Very major preoccupation with Japan in terms of the new government and how they're doing this, the realignment and the overall future of the alliance. And now they begin year two with the big piece of Asia being this trip to Southeast Asia, right, in the South Pacific. Very unusual, right? Very unusual. I can't remember the last time a US president made a trip to Southeast Asia, only to Southeast Asia when there wasn't an APEC or something like that going on. I mean, I can't remember the last time that has ever happened, because usually it's always to Northeast Asia. So I think this is sort of, they're trying to do it over. And one of the things they're clearly playing on is this notion that a trip like this really demonstrates how the United States is really an Asia Pacific power. In the beginning, in the first year they talked about how this was the first Asian president of the United States because it was upbringing in Indonesia. So you get a lot of rhetoric like this. This trip is really trying to put actions to words. Trying to really show because it is such an unusual trip to take that this is really where the rhetoric of the Asia Pacific president turns into action. I think regardless of how many deliverables or lack of deliverables we tell you about or when they brief you they will try to tell you about. No matter how many times people try to spin you, I think overall for many of you the story of the trip is homecoming, right? President's homecoming. And the fact that he's doing this is such a critical time here in terms of the domestic politics of healthcare. And I can certainly understand, I guess the one thing I would say is you know when we plan these sorts of trips and you try to figure out when is a good time to take the president and his entire tail to Asia for a week or 10 days because if you include refueling it ends up being that long. And the answer is there's never a good time, right? It's like family planning. There's never a good time to have your next child, right? So there's never a good time to do a trip like this. And obviously many would argue that this isn't a particularly good time. But I mean I think in terms if we think about it from our perspective sort of the U.S. in Asia it is a very important trip because you know half the battle with regard to U.S. standing in Asia is signaling, right? And if the president goes at this particular time when there are a lot of issues admittedly on the table here at home that is signaling something to Asia that the United States really is an Asia-specific power and it's not going to let China sort of completely dominate every aspect of this region. So I think that's an important thing. And one of the things I would like to watch carefully is sort of China's reaction to this trip because you know this really isn't, as Mike said, there isn't a whole lot of policy deliverables yet he's taking this trip and in many ways that is Chinese diplomacy, right? The Chinese are very good at having big trips where not a lot happens. So the last thing I would say about these two particular stops is we always talk about how you know there's a new agenda for the 21st century and this trip in many ways I think exemplifies the new agenda because these two countries again are not countries you would normally think of as the first stops or even any stops on an Asia-Pacific swing yet they're the two main ones and then in many ways there are two countries that really represent sort of the new agenda, right, the new 21st agenda. Both countries, as Mike said, are a member of the G20 for different reasons in terms of the global war on terror. You know 21st century agenda item, Australia has had a reputation for establishing a well-deserved reputation for punching above its weight both in Iraq and in Afghanistan and as Mike said there's some issues potentially with regard to Afghanistan and Indonesia is absolutely critical to both the fight against the global war on terror but also preventing the growth of terrorism in Southeast Asia. On climate change Australia's key country in Copenhagen and Indonesia really represents sort of the developing country sort of commitment to this global climate change agenda. There's a big debate between the developed and developing countries on this and Indonesia is trying and therefore very critical to that movement. And the last thing which I think can't be overstated is this whole question of Indonesia representing this combination of tolerance democracy you know the moderate Muslim democracy there are not many of those around and the fact that you know the president will go there in many ways it's a shame that he's not going with the family because pictures you know of the president and the kids you know visiting sites and things those pictures those pictures can probably do more to help reframe the discussion and the discourse and Islam than 50 speeches that the president might give so but in that sense that's kind of a disappointment but I still think he's there he's visiting these sites if he's speaking in the native tongue which you know he can do if he needed to I would assume these sorts of things will go a long way in in terms of reframing the discourse on Islam.