JAKARTA LIFE'S STYLE

Indonesia understands the reason for U.S. President Barack Obama’s last-minute cancellation of his visit to Jakarta and Bali, a spokesman for Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said on Friday. Obama scrapped his plan to visit Indonesia and Australia on Thursday, days before the start of his Asia-Pacific trip, in order to stay in Washington and give a final push for a U.S. healthcare overhaul.

The visit will be postponed until June. “Of course we have made maximum preparations ahead of the visit, but that does not mean we should be disappointed by the delay,” presidential spokesman Julian Pasha told Reuters.

“The delay of President Obama’s visit to Indonesia is related to urgent internal matters, so we understand. Health reform has become a hot issue in the U.S.” The rare cancellation of a presidential trip abroad underscored how Obama’s political challenges at home have begun complicating his activity overseas, stirring debate on whether he may have to scale back some foreign policy goals.

Obama had intended to use the March 21-26 trip, his first foreign travel this year, to deepen U.S. ties in the Asia-Pacific region in the face of rising Chinese influence. Obama’s first stop was to have been in the U.S. territory of Guam, a hub of American military power in the Pacific, to underline Washington’s security commitment in the region.

Then he was headed to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, where he spent four years as a child and where he was to try to build on his outreach to Muslim world. After that, he was to have visited Australia, a linchpin U.S. friend in the Pacific and key military ally in Afghanistan.(KOMPAS)

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