President Obama's failure during his three-day visit to Japan to tie down elements of a trade deal that many see as a crucial underpinning of his strategic "pivot to Asia" will feed perceptions that the US president's foreign policy touch is deserting him. The simultaneous collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian talks in which he had invested no small hope, and Vladimir Putin's daily blatant contempt for toothless US pronouncements on Ukraine, also contribute to a sense of US powerlessness and even drift.
Obama had hoped to use his visit to Japan to announce an agreement under which Japan would open its markets in rice, beef, poultry and pork, a critical step that could inject momentum into a delayed 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact. Intensive talks between US and Japanese officials this week failed to produce significant tarrif reductions – Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is under strong political pressure not to make concessions from his country's powerful farm lobby, although trade liberalisation dovetails very much with his economic reform programme.
But the US is also at fault – Obama’s hands have been tied in talks by his inability to secure sufficient negotiating authority. Any deal done with Japan would have to run the gauntlet of a hostile US Congress wielding a veto, a reality that does little to encourage Japanese flexibility when concessions would probably only whet Congress’s appetite for more.
The negotiating mandate issue is also likely to bedevil important EU-US trade talks, a mirror in international relations of the institutional gridlock that so paralyses US politics. At some point partners behgin to believe that the US simply not a country to do business with.
Obama's stay in Tokyo – the first full state visit by a US president since 1996 – will, however, have pleased Abe in one important respect. The US president made clear that the US regards the East China Sea islands currently in dispute between Japan and China – known in Japan as the Senkaku – as covered by treaty security guarantees to Japan. He dodged, however, pronouncing on their sovereignty to avoid antagonising China.