Obama’s China trip, conciliatory; “stark contrast” with past; barely short of abject failure.

The Washington Post is in contortions not to brand Obama’s China trip a failure saying instead  “Obama has emerged from his first trip to China with no big breakthroughs on important issues, such as Iran’s nuclear program or China’s currency. Yet after two days of talks with the United States’ biggest creditor, the administration asserted that relations between the two countries are at “at an all-time high.”

This is largely fantasy as China has been caught red-handed trying to coverup its role in a Iranian ship stuffed full of North Korean arms and munitions that capcized in the Yangtze Delta last week, and information from Taiwan showing it has begin construction on its first aircraft carrier clearly designed to challenge the U. S. Pacific fleet and project power.

The Post reporters point out the  one and only concrete advance emerged — that the United States may offer a target for carbon-emission cuts to boost climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month if China offers its own proposal — a relatively small step for a new president who had campaigned on a promise to enact far-reaching change in U.S. diplomatic interactions.

Conversely the most significant change during this trip  was in the United States’ newly conciliatory and sometimes laudatory tone. In a joint appearance with President Hu Jintao on Tuesday, Obama hailed China as an economic partner that has “proved critical in our effort to pull ourselves out of the worst recession in generations.” The day before, speaking to students in Shanghai, he described China’s rising prosperity as “an accomplishment unparalleled in human history.”

On a visit to the Great Wall Wednesday after his last official business, a morning meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the U.S. president offered yet more gushing tributes. He declared the ancient structure “spectacular” and “majestic” and told a Chinese journalist that he had “great admiration for Chinese civilization.”

U.S. presidents have been trekking to China — and also lauding the Great Wall — since Richard Nixon visited in 1972. But, in both form and content, Obama’s trip stood in stark contrast to the journeys of his predecessors–a change that has been the central undercurrent of Obama’s swing through China this week.

In 1998, when President Bill Clinton stood before television cameras in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, the United States owed more money to Spain than to China and did more than twice as much trade with Mexico. Then Clinton criticized China’s military crackdown a decade earlier in Tiananmen Square and traded spirited jibes with President Jiang Zemin.

On Tuesday, Obama stood in the same building alongside another Chinese leader. This time, with the United States in hock to China for more than $1 trillion dollars and flooded with Chinese-made goods, it was a Chinese-style news conference. Each leader read a prepared statement and eyed the other in silence. There were no questions.

Obama’s so-called stimulus package involved borrowing most of the $800 billion, and much of that from China. Forty-three cents of every dollar Obama and company spend is borrowed.

China has clout that the United States now desperately needs. “The U.S.-China relationship has gone global,” said Jon Huntsman Jr., the new U.S. ambassador to Beijing and a fluent Chinese speaker. China has been far more insistent about asserting its will.

Obama even succumbed to China who orchestrated the town hall meeting filling it with hand picked carefully briefed students.

Despite assurances by White House flack Gibbs to the contrary the trip was a flop bordering on embarrassment.

Edited and supplemented from an article by Andrew Higgins and Anne E. Kornblut

Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, November 18, 2009; 10:16 AM