President Donald Trump’s 11-day trip to Asia, starting next week, will include stops in China, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam, including attendance at summits of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and Association of Southeast Asian Nations organizations. The general focus will be what to do about North Korea’s nuclear rocket-rattling in the region, his promises to the American electorate about negotiating better trade arrangements and a wide assortment of bilateral issues with the leaders of the individual countries.
President Donald Trump’s 11-day trip to Asia, starting next week, will include stops in China, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam, including attendance at summits of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and Association of Southeast Asian Nations organizations. The general focus will be what to do about North Korea’s nuclear rocket-rattling in the region, his promises to the American electorate about negotiating better trade arrangements and a wide assortment of bilateral issues with the leaders of the individual countries.
Some of the issues are exceptionally complicated.
Russia, for example, is a member of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. It is unknown whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend the summit, to be hosted in Vietnam, although it is quite possible he will, given the good relations that exist between Russia and Vietnam and that Chinese President Xi Jinping is likely to be there as well.
Myanmar, pounding its Rohingya minority and having driven hundreds of thousands of them into Bangladesh in appalling conditions, is a member of ASEAN; its de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, might attend the summit; and discussion of the human rights aspects of that country’s treatment of its Muslim minority with whomever represents it would be difficult for Trump to avoid.
The Philippines will host the ASEAN conference. Its president, Rodrigo Duterte, has an appalling humanitarian record, has openly criticized Trump and America in vulgar terms, and a potential confrontation between Trump and him will loom, with close media attention.
The leaders of China and Japan, Xi Jinping and Shinzo Abe, will be coming off formidable political triumphs at home and riding high in general.
Xi will have just completed the every-five-years Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, at which he was elevated by having his “thoughts” incorporated into party dogma, and also was able to name a no-threat group of new members to the party’s standing committee of the Politburo.
Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party just won an early election he called to Japan’s parliament, setting the stage for constitutional changes he contemplates, to include re-militarization of Japan’s security posture. He is bound to ask Trump what the United States’ position will be on that development, a change from Japanese and U.S. policy since the end of World War II in 1945.
With South Korea, directly concerned, Trump will need to discuss the next moves in his and America’s running confrontation with North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un, about Pyongyang’s approach to nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
All in all, Trump will be faced with a large plateful of complex issues, some dangerous, all of which will be virtually impossible to dodge addressing as U.S. president, closely watched by Americans and the world, as well as by his interlocuters.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette