IT is, to say the least, an odd time to be taking the longest trip away from the Oval Office of Obama's presidency, said the Guardian in an editorial published Sunday. Excerpts: Just three days after getting the worst drubbing of his career, Barack Obama flew off for a 10-day spin around Asia that encompasses India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea. There is a G20 summit thrown in, and Obama is bringing 200 business leaders, so he can argue that the trip is all about drumming up orders for US jobs. Indian investment alone accounts for 75,000 of those. Even so, he is either one cool dude or he has still not got the message. No one is quite sure which. Under the constitution, the president both has the initiative and plays the predominant role in foreign policy. The international stage is the only one in which he can be relatively free of a Republican veto. But this freedom is relative. A pro-Israeli Cuban-American is taking over the chairmanship of the house foreign affairs committee, which will surely cheer Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. There could be problems ahead in the Senate over an important treaty which the president has already signed with Russia, the strategic arms reduction treaty. Some of the more cold-war minded Republicans could put an oar in here too, claiming the treaty limits anti-missile deployments. Perhaps paradoxically, Mr. Obama needs to be at home just to safeguard his foreign agenda. But the fact that Mr. Obama and David Cameron will be in India and China respectively next week with posses of businessmen in tow speaks volumes about who needs whom in today's world. US trade with India is more balanced than it is with China, even though it is only a fraction of it. But Delhi is just as troubled by America's superpower role. __
