By the short stairs

True to his nickname, “No Drama Obama,” the American president wants it known that he took no umbrage at the fact that there was no stairway waiting to help him descend from Air Force One last week when he landed in Hangzhou. But he’s a little miffed that critics have seized on that incident as symbolic of tensions in the US-China relationship.

New York Times correspondent Mark Landler detected a “sarcastic edge” in Obama’s reply to questions from the White House press corps in Luang Prabang, the last stop of what surely will be Obama’s final visit to the region as president. Obama seemed especially peeved by suggestions that “stair-gate” proves his administration’s much-touted “pivot” to Asia is a flop.

“If this theory about my reception and my rebalance policy is based on me going down the short stairs in China, yes, I think that is overblown,” Obama said. “Any reasonable person, certainly any person in the region, would be puzzled as to how this became somehow indicative of the work that we’ve done here.”

Well, reasonable people can disagree. And sometimes even unreasonable people offer compelling arguments. In this case, Charles Krauthammer (with whom I rarely agree on anything) raises an excellent point. In a recent Washington Post column he observes that no nation pays more attention to matters of diplomatic protocol than China.  China’s leaders, says Krauthammer, are “masters of every tributary gesture, every nuance of hierarchical ritual. In a land so exquisitely sensitive to protocol, rolling staircases don’t just disappear at arrival ceremonies.”

Yes, Krauthammer is a conservative pundit with a political axe to grind. But he makes a case with which few foreign China experts–regardless of their partisan affiliations–would disagree.

The “weird irrationality” of America’s China policy

I finally got around to reading Gideon Rachman’s essay in the Life & Arts section of the Financial Times. I know, it was last weekend’s Life & Arts section. But the ponderous title, “War and peace in Asia,” gave me pause.

In fairness, Rachman is a graceful writer. He marches briskly through “5,000 years of Chinese civilization,” Europe’s rise and fall and America’s emergence and decline as the world’s preeminent superpower, arriving finally at what he sees as the paradox of US foreign policy during the Obama years:

The US has deliberately hung back from deeper involvement in the Middle East, partly because it is attempting to preserve its power and resources for a struggle with a rising China. Yet power is also a matter of perceptions. So the vision of America that is less committed to playing the role of global policeman in Europe and the Middle East has–ironically–also sown doubts about the durability of US power within Asia itself.

Rachman believes that, if  Hilary Clinton triumphs in the U.S. presidential election, she will remain committed to the twin pillars of U.S. foreign policy since 1945: maintenance of open global markets and the U.S. alliance system. But Rachman says the stability of those pillars is being steadily undermined by the “easternization” of global economic and political power.