Eli Lake, Columnist

Obama's Pivot to Asia Fails to Deter China

The U.S. has strengthened alliances, but Beijing continues to build islands and threaten neighbors.

September 7, 2016 at 10:20 AM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Xi has a reason to smile.
Photographer: Wang Zhou/Pool/Getty Images)

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It is tragic and fitting that President Barack Obama's latest failure to reach a cease-fire in Syria would take place at Hangzhou, China, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit Monday.

It's tragic because this latest diplomatic flop in Syria will mean the death toll in that civil war, already at a staggering 400,000, will grow. It's fitting, though, because the rationale for Obama's reluctance to intervene in Syria goes back to a first-term strategy to pivot diplomatic attention and military hardware away from wars in the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region.