AP Photo Obama's Asian distraction? 'It would have been a very, very bad message to cancel the trip and demonstrate that eight thugs with assault weapons can divert the travel itinerary of the president of the United States,' said one observer.

Just as pressure grows for the White House to take more action in the Middle East, President Barack Obama is heading instead to the Philippines and Malaysia to meet with Asian leaders and promote a trade deal.

As if the trip's timing wasn't awkward enough, Obama may have to pose before the cameras in a "silly shirt" while he's there.


Such are the perils of Obama's "pivot to Asia."

The White House has long insisted the U.S. must focus more on that region of the world, noting in a fact sheet released ahead of the trip that "with nearly half of the earth’s population, one-third of global GDP, and some of the world’s most capable militaries, Asia and the Pacific is increasingly the world’s political and economic center of gravity."

But the Middle East — with its wars in Syria and Yemen and the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group — keeps trying to pull Obama back.

"There is a sort of an old saw in Washington, which has a lot of truth to it, that the urgent usually crowds out the important," said Jeremy Shapiro, a foreign policy specialist at the Brookings Institution. "The pivot to Asia has been a very rare effort to avoid that ... to say that the Middle East is urgent, but Asia is actually important."

Even if the headlines don't all follow, Obama seems determined to push ahead with what his aides call the "Rebalance" (they sometimes capitalize it). Clinching the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal is a major example. Obama hosted a state dinner for China's president in September, and his administration has pushed to strengthen multilateral Asian organizations.

During his visit to Philippines this week, Obama will attend the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group's summit. That's where the assembled leaders often don special shirts in honor of the host country; what some dub the "silly shirt" group photos are supposed to be a moment of levity. Later, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Obama will participate in the East Asia Summit and the U.S.-ASEAN summit.

Presidential trips abroad usually are planned long in advance, and Obama heads to Asia after a stop in Turkey for the G-20 summit, where he addressed the chaos in the Middle East extensively. Still, Friday's attacks in Paris, which are believed to be the work of the Islamic State and that killed more than 130 people, have cast a pall over the rest of the president's itinerary.

Kristin Smith Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said that obviously presidents need to be able to focus on multiple issues at one time, but the six-day Asia trip doesn't send the best signal right now.

"Arab Gulf allies in particular have taken the administration’s pivot to Asia as an indication of a relative lack of interest in their affairs," she said. "Many are responding with their own economic rebalancing towards Asia, and diversification of their allies."

White House aides push back on the notion that the Middle East needs to take up more of the president's time than it already does, even though Obama has been accused of not taking the Islamic State or the war in Syria seriously.

In recent comments with reporters, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes stressed that the U.S. is a global leader, with the emphasis on global. "We have to balance very broad global interests that include the situation in Syria and counterterrorism, but, by definition as a global leader, must include the Asia Pacific," he said.

That said, Obama's priorities have been quick to shift away from Asia and back to the Middle East depending on which ally seeks his attention.

In January, Obama cut short his three-day trip to India to head to Saudi Arabia, where the king had just died and a new one was taking over. The oil-rich kingdom, a key power broker in the Arab world, has always been in a special category for the U.S. government, but the move unsettled many Asia watchers.

Shapiro said that, regardless of the Saudi example, this week's trip shows the Obama administration is intent on making its presence felt in Asia. Besides, "it would have been a very, very bad message to cancel the trip and demonstrate that eight thugs with assault weapons can divert the travel itinerary of the president of the United States," he said of the Paris attackers.

Counterterrorism and security issues overall will likely come up in Obama's conversations with Asian leaders, many of whom are especially concerned about Beijing's aggressive moves in the South China Sea and some of whom face Islamist militant movements of their own.

As for the "silly shirts," with a few exceptions, the tradition has held since then-President Bill Clinton in 1993 gave his fellow leaders leather bomber jackets to wear. Obama bucked the custom in 2011, when he gave visiting leaders special shirts as they met in Hawaii but didn't ask them to wear them for a photo.

The shirt tradition returned a couple of years later, however, in Indonesia. According to The Associated Press, this year's sartorial specialty will be "the Philippines' barong tagalog, a partially see-through, embroidered shirt sewn from pineapple fiber and silk."

It wasn't yet clear whether Obama would skip the silly shirt tradition in light of the serious times.