JOHN KERRY, America’s secretary of state, set off this week on a tour that takes him to China, South Korea, Indonesia and Abu Dhabi. Rightly sensitive to the charge that Barack Obama’s administration is neglectful of Asia, officials are keen to remind the world that this is Mr Kerry’s fifth trip to North-East and South-East Asia in a year. He in particular has been criticised in the region for being too preoccupied with peacemaking in the Middle East to pursue the “pivot” or “rebalancing” to Asia announced in the president’s first term. And despite his air miles, American diplomacy in Asia is not going well. Relations with the emerging power, China, remain fraught; the United States is at odds on important issues with its biggest regional ally, Japan; and its efforts to forge a new regional trade agreement have missed deadlines.

Some Asian diplomats blame the perception of American disengagement for China’s recent assertiveness in pressing its claims in territorial disputes in the region. Mr Obama sent the wrong signal, they say, by pulling out of two summits in South-East Asia last October because his government was partly shut down. Whatever the cause, one effect of China’s alleged assertiveness is to stymie the broad-based, co-operative relationship that America and China say they want. Instead, meetings are overshadowed by regional tensions, and in particular the worry that Japan and China may clash as both patrol around the disputed Senkaku or Diaoyu islands by sea and air. America says it takes no position on the islands’ sovereignty, but regards them as under Japanese administration and so covered by its security treaty with Japan.

This month a senior American official again criticised China’s unilateral declaration in November of an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) over a part of the East China Sea that includes the disputed islands. He warned China that declaring another ADIZ over the South China Sea, where it also disputes territory with Taiwan and four South-East Asian countries, might prompt a redeployment of American forces. And Daniel Russel, an assistant secretary of state, laid into the “nine-dashed line”, which China points to in maps from the 1940s as giving it sovereignty over almost the whole of the South China Sea. He said it has no legal status under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. (Chinese officials may think this a bit rich, since America, unlike China, has never ratified the convention, but then China seems not to want to limit its claim by citing the law.)

China rejects American criticism, which it believes emboldens the countries that challenge its claims. It was outraged earlier this month when Benigno Aquino, the Philippines’ president, compared the world’s passivity in the face of Chinese encroachments in the South China Sea to the territorial appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The Philippines is another American treaty ally, though in contrast to its promises to Japan, America has made clear its guarantee does not cover areas under dispute with China (and others).

Similarly, China’s official news agency, Xinhua, has accused America of continuing “to spoil troublemaking Japan”. For China the decision by Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, to visit Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine in December, where war criminals are among those honoured, was proof of his government’s unrepentant attitude to Japan’s imperialist past and of its intention to revive Japanese military glory. Then this month one of Mr Abe’s appointments as a governor of the state broadcaster, NHK, claimed that the Nanjing massacre, an atrocity perpetrated by Japanese soldiers in 1937, was a fabrication.

For America, all of this is a headache. It would like Japan to bear more of the burden of regional security, and it applauds Mr Abe’s wish to reinterpret Japan’s pacifist constitution to allow the country more military latitude. America also needs Mr Abe’s support in a years-long effort to relocate a controversial American airbase on the island of Okinawa. But it deplores the tendency of the Japanese right to dismiss any criticism of Japan’s war record as “victors’ justice”. Mr Obama is to visit Japan (as well as Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea) in April. In Japan, he will have to find a way to distance America from Mr Abe’s revisionism. If he is too hard on Mr Abe, however, America could hand China the diplomatic prize of an open rift between the treaty allies.

Already American strategy in the region is undermined by the terrible relations between Japan and South Korea, which is even more sensitive to Japanese attempts to rewrite history. Yet North Korea, despite a little flurry of friendly gestures this week, is an ever-present, nuclear-armed threat to regional security. Indeed, worries about the stability of its regime are mounting. It would be in the interests of America, China, Japan and South Korea alike to agree on a strategy for dealing with the North. But they are too busy disagreeing among themselves.

On the slow track?

The Obama administration is still struggling to convince Asia that its pivot amounts to much. The policy has entailed some lofty rhetoric about America’s Pacific destiny, much shuttling by senior officials, some modest military redeployments and—with greater emphasis in recent months as it has seemed closer to fruition—the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an ambitious trade agreement involving America, Japan and ten other countries (not including China), together accounting for a third of global trade.

Having missed the goal of finalising the TPP in 2013, negotiators are due to gather in Singapore on February 22nd for another try. They would be given a boost if Mr Obama’s team had “fast-track” authority to reach a deal that could not then be unpicked line by line in Congress. But winning congressional approval for fast track is looking difficult. Mr Obama’s aides say he is still intent on trying. Many in Asia, still unconvinced that “America’s first Pacific president” is really committed to his country’s leading role in the region, will want to see how hard.

Economist.com/blogs/banyan