Jeffrey A. Bader, who helped steer Obama’s ‘pivot’ to Asia, dies at 78
Jeffrey A. Bader, one of the nation’s leading experts on China and architect of President Barack Obama’s so-called pivot to the Pacific during his first administration, died Oct. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 78.
His death in a hospice was due to complications from pancreatic cancer, his wife Rohini Talalla said.
In a statement, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called Mr. Bader “one of the most knowledgeable and insightful East Asian hands of his generation, and his intellect was matched only by his heart and his decency.”
Few Americans had as much diplomatic or policy experience in China as Mr. Bader. His involvement with the country dates back to 1977, when as a young Foreign Service officer he was tasked with helping Washington implement formal ties with Beijing.
The work placed him deep within the apparatus of American diplomacy, an education that gave him a keen insight into how foreign relations actually work—not through grand ideologies and pronouncements, but through the daily grind of personal contact.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Bader headed the East Asia portfolio for the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, a role he reprized a decade later under Mr. Obama.
“He was really the ultimate effective diplomat,” Susan Shirk, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who worked alongside him in the Clinton administration, said in a telephone interview. “He was the sharpest operating person.”
Mr. Bader advised both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama to take a pragmatic, clear-eyed view of China. He largely rejected both the sentimental view that China was moving toward greater openness and democracy and the aggressive pessimism that predicted an inevitable clash between the two powers.
“US policy toward a rising China could not rely solely on military power, economic enticement, and human rights pressure and sanctions,” he wrote in his memoir, “Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy” ( 2012). “At the same time, a policy of permissiveness and accommodation to assertive Chinese behavior, or indifference to its internal evolution, could encourage bad behavior.”
After serving as a close adviser to Mr. Obama during his 2008 campaign, Mr. Bader helped oversee what the president called his “pivot” to Asia — a term that Mr. Bader shunned, finding it overly militaristic ( although the policy change did). have a strong military component).
He preferred to call it a “rebalancing,” a term that recognized China’s growing importance to America’s future and the need to devote more resources to managing bilateral relations. He recommended a nuanced approach, recognizing that China was a rising global power that needed to be addressed, but not confronted.
“He was not naive about China, but he saw the importance of a constructive relationship,” said former California Gov. Jerry Brown, who is now chairman of the California-China Climate Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, and who trusted in recent years to Mr Bader for advice. “He had a vision that was more realistic and optimistic.”
Jeffrey Allen Bader was born on July 1, 1945, in New York City, the son of Samuel Bader, a lawyer, and Grace (Rosenbloom) Bader, a lawyer and homemaker.
He graduated with a degree in history from Yale in 1967 and a doctorate in the same subject from Columbia in 1975, the same year he joined the State Department.
He married Ms. Talalla, a documentary filmmaker and advocate for indigenous development, in 1995. Together with her he is survived by his brother Lawrence.
Mr. Bader did not begin his diplomatic career with the ambition to become a Chinese hand. He had studied European history, spoke French and spent his first two years at the American embassy in Kinshasa, the capital of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But in 1977, Richard Holbrooke, the new Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was on the hunt for bright, young officers to help with the massive effort underway around U.S.-China relations. He singled out Mr. Bader and gave him the job.
A lot was discussed: trade, nuclear weapons, human rights and America’s complicated relationship with Taiwan. There wasn’t even an American embassy in Beijing.
Mr. Bader lived in Beijing for several years, an experience he often described in detail to explain how far the country had come.
“The city itself was a pretty bleak, dreary place.” he said in a 2022 podcast interview with The China Project, a news and information website. “There were no restaurants, no public restaurants at all. I ate almost every meal at the Beijing Hotel for two years, a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
He left in 1983, but returned four years later to find clear signs of the modern consumer economy the country would become.
He also saw the dangers of China’s rise. Mr. Bader played a central role in formulating the U.S. response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and to the sudden tensions that arose after China conducted a series of missile tests near Taiwan in 1996.
He left the Chinese region in 1999 to serve as U.S. ambassador to Namibia for two years, but returned in 2001 as an assistant U.S. trade representative, helping complete China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.
Mr. Bader left the government in 2002 to become a senior scientist at the Washington-based agency Brookings Institution. Then, in 2005, Mr. Obama, then a freshman senator from Illinois, asked him for a briefing on China.
The two spent three hours in the senator’s office, eating Thai takeout and discussing policy. Mr. Bader left the meeting convinced that if Mr. Obama were to run for president, he would win — and that he would want to be part of an Obama administration.
The Obama White House was preoccupied with China, especially during his first term. The global recession had put America at a disadvantage, but relatively spared China, which was beginning to manifest itself internationally.
Mr. Bader stayed with Mr. Obama for more than two years before returning to Brookings, long enough to see the change taking place and to believe that America was on the right track. And while he later criticized Donald J. Trump’s administration for its protectionist approach to China, he was not alarmed. He remained convinced that the ebb and flow of tensions was simply part of the great balance of power.
“Over time, there are interests that overlap to some extent and diverge to some extent,” he told The New York Times in 2012. But the recent story is largely positive.”