Obama to seek closure in visits to Japan, Vietnam

President Barack Obama walks from Marine One to board Air Force One, in Andrews Air Force Base, Md, Saturday, May 21, 2016, en route to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, then to Yokota Air Force Base, in Fussa, Japan, on his way to Hanoi, Vietnam.
President Barack Obama walks from Marine One to board Air Force One, in Andrews Air Force Base, Md, Saturday, May 21, 2016, en route to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, then to Yokota Air Force Base, in Fussa, Japan, on his way to Hanoi, Vietnam.

WASHINGTON-For nearly eight years, President Barack Obama has struggled to end wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Next week, he'll try to close chapters on two other ones instead-Vietnam and World War II.

Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima and will meet with survivors of the atomic bombings that ended World War II. He will also travel to Vietnam, to whose which he is considering selling more weapons, a sign of how the U.S.-Vietnam relationship has changed in the decades since the war there ended.

For the president who promised to end two wars that nonetheless have continues, the end points this week in Vietnam and Japan-decades in the making-show just how hard that is, and how long peace could ultimately take.

"We've seen the difficulty or inability to disengage from the war on terror, including in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center. "And he has seen that these U.S. commitments to protect friends and allies can be long-standing commitments, as evidenced by our continued presence in South Korea and Japan and Germany."

Obama will pay heed to the past by promoting how far the alliances with Vietnam and Japan have come since the countries were enemies of the U.S. He plans to highlight growing commercial ties in Vietnam, one of the 12 countries that are part of the Pacific Rim trade deal being negotiated. In Japan, where he will also meet with the heads of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, Obama's visit to Hiroshima is an opportunity to revisit his efforts toward nuclear nonproliferation. "The very fact that the United States is traveling to Japan, that it's now one of our closest allies in the world, and Vietnam, which is an emerging partner of ours, demonstrates how you are able to move beyond difficult history," said White House deputy national security advissr Ben Rhodes. Terrorism has been a main concern at previous G7 summits, and world leaders are once again expected to talk about their shared interest in defeating Islamic State, ending the devastating war in Syria and stemming the flow of refugees from the troubled Middle East.

Obama took office with hopes of removing U.S. combat troops from Iraq. Though the White House says the 5,500 military personnel who remain in Iraq and Syria don't carry that label, Obama's former defense secretary, Robert Gates, said this week that the troops are seeing so much action and danger that they are clearly "in combat."

Further underscoring the difficultly of U.S. withdrawal is the growing instability in Afghanistan, where Taliban fighters recently managed to take control of the city of Kunduz. Obama has abandoned a 2012 plan to withdraw by 2016 and instead will leave 5,000 combat troops in Afghanistan when he vacates the Oval Office.

"We cannot just leave, because the conditions don't allow it," said Kurt Campbell, who as assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2009 to 2013 was an architect of Obama's rebalance of resources toward Asia. "The key challenge is finding the hours, being completely determined over a period of years about looking to Asia and to the future." "That's what the president has to do-find the time to balance out this essential imbalance in the energy we spend in the Middle East and the energy we spend elsewhere," he said. Obama's trip, a blend of trade talk, diplomacy and history, is designed to do just that. He'll meet with leaders of the communist government in Vietnam as well as political dissidents, before giving an address in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, to mark the end of the Vietnam War 41 years after the city fell to the North Vietnamese.

He'll pitch the Pacific trade deal he is trying to push through Congress by meeting with entrepreneurs and business leaders in Vietnam, Southeast Asia's fastest-growing economy. If American businesses can't more fully embrace Vietnam's burgeoning middle class, his aides argue, China or others will.

On his final day in Japan, Obama will go to Hiroshima, where the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb used in war in 1945.