Lee Guan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, slipped into the White House before President Obama could make his Grand Tour of Asia starting next week (h/t Shanghaiist). Lee lectured Obama on the shifting center of gravity in geopolitics from West to East, insisting that “The 21st century will be a contest for supremacy in the Pacific because that’s where the growth will be…If you do not hold your ground in the Pacific you cannot be a world leader.”

And yet it rather seems the United States is humbling itself as a debtor that has been wrong-footed with its main creditor. On contentious issues from trade, through the environment through human rights through freedom of religious practice, the State Department would prefer to remain mute. With an impending healthcare bill America will have to pay for (threatening an additional debt load of US$1 trillion over the next ten years), the U.S. government is feeling a bitas sheepish as a university student who has maxed out the limit on the credit card his parents gave him and now has to buy new school books.

However, if America would like to maintain its credibility in the Asia-Pacific region, it is going to have to separate principal from finance, and act on the sorts of priorities the Mr. Lee alluded to in his grandfatherly advice to the President of the United States. Otherwise, the U.S. risks getting pushed off the realpolitik see-saw by China.

Further Reading: FT