WASHINGTON (AP) -
Less than two weeks after his re-election,
President Barack Obama will become the first U.S. president to visit the
once pariah nation of Myanmar, drawing attention to the country's shift
to democracy and highlighting what his administration regards as a
marquee foreign policy achievement.
Obama will also travel to
Cambodia, a first for a U.S. president as well, and to Thailand during
the Nov. 17-20 trip. In Cambodia, the president will attend the East
Asia summit in Phnom Penh and meet with leaders of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations.
The symbolic highlight of
the trip, no doubt, is Obama's stop in Myanmar, also known as Burma, a
country emerging from five decades of ruinous military rule. While
there, Obama will meet with President Thein Sein and also with Nobel
laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the White House said.
While the trip places new
focus on Obama's foreign policy and to American attention to the Asia
and Pacific region, it also comes at as Obama begins sensitive
negotiations with congressional leaders about how to avoid looming tax
increases and steep cuts in defense and domestic spending.
Obama ended the
longstanding U.S. isolation of Myanmar's generals, which has played a
part in coaxing them into political reforms that have unfolded with
surprising speed in the past year. The U.S. has appointed a full
ambassador and suspended sanctions to reward Myanmar for political
prisoner releases and Suu Kyi's election to parliament.
In a statement, White House
press secretary Jay Carney said Obama intended to "speak to civil
society to encourage Burma's ongoing democratic transition."
A procession of senior
diplomats and world leaders have traveled to the country, stopping both
in the remote, opulent capital city Naypyitaw, built by the former
ruling junta, and at Suu Kyi's dilapidated lakeside villa in the main
city Yangon, where she spent 15 years under house arrest.
The most senior U.S.
official to visit previously is Hillary Rodham Clinton who in December
became the first U.S. secretary of state to travel to Myanmar in 56
years.
The Obama administration
regards the political changes in Myanmar as a top foreign policy
achievement, and one that could dilute the influence of China in a
country that has a strategic location between South Asia and Southeast
Asia, regions of growing economic importance.
But exiled Myanmar
activists and human rights groups are likely to criticize an Obama visit
as premature, rewarding Thein Sein before his political and economic
reforms have been consolidated. The military is still dominant and
implicated in rights abuses. It has failed to prevent vicious outbreaks
of communal violence in the west of the country that have left scores
dead.
While no U.S. president has
ever visited Cambodia or Myanmar, Thailand is one of the America's
oldest allies in Asia and has been a stop for American commanders in
chief since the mid-1960s, according to the State Department historian's
office, which compiles records on presidential travel.
George W. Bush visited
Thailand twice while president, in 2003 and 2008, Bill Clinton visited
in 1996. During the war in neighboring Vietnam, Richard Nixon traveled
there in 1969 and Lyndon Johnson in 1966 and 1967, the records show.
