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the IMF, known as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), but largely failed (with Britain leading the way to join) and subsequentlyfound itself on the outside looking in. The administration could have handled this issue with more dexterity, trying to channel Beijing’s ambitions constructively and without the premature opposition that only served to isolate Washington.
    D ESPITE SUCH SETBACKS , the rebalance to Asia has been a significant strategic shift, positioning the US for the future. The analyst David Milne concluded that Obama’s strategy “toward Asia may be viewed as the Obama administration’s principal foreign policy legacy thirty years hence.” 4 Administration officials often remark how much better America’s standing in Asia is today, saying that when they attend Asia summits, they don’t hear much about US “retreat” or “credibility” or “red lines”—terms that dominate the conversation in other regions, especially the Middle East. But in at least three ways, the story of the rebalance also reveals some of the challenges to the strategy in both concept and execution.
    First, although nearly every foreign policy expert believes the rebalance makes strategic sense, it is very hard to get credit for such moves in the moment. Secretary Clinton described the rebalance as a “quiet effort,” one in which “a lot of our work has not been on the front pages, both because of its nature—long-term investment is less exciting than immediate crises—and because of competing headlines in other parts of the world.” 5 The key payoffs of the rebalance—closer relationships and more effective regional institutions; a robust military presence; improved economic ties—are not blockbuster developments that attract fanfare. They can only be fully appreciated in time. The rebalance is what Obama had in mind when he spoke of turning a ship’s direction just a few degrees at a time—what appears incremental can ultimately be profound.
    Rebalancing requires patience and stamina, which can be tough to sustain when other events place demands on finite resources and time. Leaders can be distracted by other parts of the world andcompeting priorities, especially when prodded by the Washington debate, which tends to magnify disproportionally issues of the moment. During many of Obama’s trips to Asia, events elsewhere crowded out the news, making it hard to get much attention. And some Asian officials and experts perceived that with the departure of such officials as Hillary Clinton and Tom Donilon, who were critical to designing the rebalance strategy and were deeply invested in it, implementation lost focus. That is unfair—especially because the most important driver of the rebalance wasn’t any single advisor, but the president—yet such perceptions matter.
    Domestic politics can also throw a strategy off course. Sometimes this is indirect—in October 2013 Obama had to cancel a four-country trip to Asia because of budget battles with Republicans in Congress that threatened a government shutdown. But other times politics has a direct impact—on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has come out against the TPP agreement that she had championed as secretary of state.
    Second, even if the Obama administration gets credit for having the right approach, it has been dogged by worries that the strategy’s implementation falls short of its ambition. There is constant concern that, because the rebalance is one of those “important” issues that the “urgent” pushes aside, it is under-resourced. There is only so much military, economic and political bandwidth to go around. This is true today, but would even be more apparent should future presidents make different decisions. For example, if the US gets involved in another major ground war in the Middle East, it will be harder if