TOKYO - President Barack Obama declared Saturday that an era of American disengagement in the globe's fastest-growing region is over and warned the U.S. and its Asian partners "will not be cowed" by North Korea's continued defiance over its nuclear weapons and other provocations.
"It should be clear where that path leads," Obama said. "We will continue to send a clear message through our actions, and not just our words: North Korea's refusal to meet its international obligations will lead only to less security, not more."
Calling for greater U.S. engagement in Asia, Obama said Americans should not fear a robust China, but he cautioned all nations must respect human rights, including religious freedoms.
"We welcome China's efforts to play a greater role on the world stage, a role in which their growing economy is joined by growing responsibility," Obama said.
Obama offered an incentive for North Korea to abandon the nuclear weapons it is believed to already have and the production program it continues in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions. He outlined a possible future of economic opportunity and greater global greater security and respect. "This respect cannot be earned through belligerence," he said.
More broadly, the president's speech before 1,500 prominent Japanese in a soaring downtown Tokyo concert hall was intended to showcase a United States that, under Obama's leadership, seeks deeper and more equal engagement in Asia. It was the fifth major foreign address of Obama's 10-month presidency, this one geared toward setting a new tone for the sometimes-rocky U.S. relationship with the region.
Acknowledging Asia's growing power and perception of America's parallel decline here, Obama aides and the president himself had said the chief aim for his eight-day trip through Asia wasn't so much to bring home specific "deliverables" but to convincingly press the point that the U.S. very much is in the Asian game.
Obama called himself "America's first Pacific president."
In his scene-setting speech of those travels, Obama promised that Washington would work hard to strengthen already established alliances in Asia, such as with Japan and South Korea, build on newer ones with nations like China and Indonesia and increase its participation with a burgeoning alphabet soup of Asian multilateral organizations. The involvement, the president said, is not just academic -- but crucial to the issues "that matter most to our people," such as jobs, a cleaner environment and preventing dangerous weapons proliferation.
"I want every American to know that we have a stake in the future of this region, because what happens here has a direct effect on our lives at home," he said. "The fortunes of America and the Asia Pacific have become more closely linked than ever before."
Obama also sounded free-trade notes sure to be welcome in Asia, where nations are rapidly seeking agreements with each other even as the U.S. hangs back on new free-trade pacts.
On China, Obama suggested there was no need to fear Beijing's rapid rise. He called for harnessing China's clout to progress on shared interests like weapons proliferation, a better global economy and a cleaner world.
"In an interconnected world, power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another," he said. "So the United States does not seek to contain China."
He also said the United States "will never waver in speaking up for the fundamental values that we hold dear." And yet, clearly hoping to avoid overly irritating Beijing, he named none of the many and serious specific human rights concerns with respect to China, including Tibet, where authorities have suppressed religious freedom and national aspirations.
"Indigenous cultures and economic growth have not been stymied by respect for human rights, they have been strengthened by it," the president said. "Supporting human rights provides lasting security that cannot be purchased in any other way."
Obama's remarks came near the start of a trip presenting him with risks at every stop.
In Japan, the relationship with the U.S. is on newly delicate footing after a change in leadership in Tokyo that has the Japanese moving toward greater independence from Washington and closer ties with the rest of Asia. Saturday night, Obama arrives in Singapore, where he is to join a larger meeting that includes the leader of a brutal regime in Myanmar, also known as Burma. He is the first U.S. president to make such close contact.
Then he flies to China, where relations with the U.S. are bedeviled by Beijing's growing economic, political and military might, as well as numerous issues including trade, currency, Taiwan, human rights and climate change. Obama ends his trip on an easier note in South Korea, an increasingly reliable U.S. ally.
Obama made Tokyo the venue for his speech, a symbolically important choice that displayed respect for Japan's long history as the U.S.' chief ally in Asia and one of the region's foremost democracies.
In an effort to move relations between the world's two largest economies toward more settled footing, Obama laid on the compliments. He noted that the leader of the Japan was the first to come to the Oval Office after he assumed the presidency and that Japan also was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's first stop on her first overseas trip
"Our efforts in the Asia Pacific will be rooted, in no small measure, through an enduring and revitalized alliance between the United States and Japan," Obama said.
