WASHINGTON - MR BARACK Obama this week heads to Asia for the first time as president, seeking to show the region and a rising China the United States is not in decline nor distracted by multiple crises elsewhere.

In a flurry of summits and snatched sightseeing, Mr Obama will leverage his personal popularity in a region where he spent childhood years, and which is now leading the world out of recession while the crippled US economy struggles.

Mr Obama will begin his tour in Japan, attend the Apec summit in Singapore, have a rare encounter with a Myanmar leader at a historic US-Asean meeting, pay his first visit to China and go to South Korea.

The president's top Asia policy aide Jeffrey Bader said the previous Bush administration saw relations with Asia mostly through a prism of its global anti-terror campaign - an approach Mr Obama will seek to change.

As a newly confident China expanded its regional clout, Washington's prestige suffered from the unsustainable spending and borrowing binge that triggered the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

'These phenomena has persuaded many Asians that the US is overextended and distracted,' said Mr Bader, director of Asian Affairs on the National Security Council. 'I believe reports of America's demise, as they say, are considerably exaggerated and will look rather foolish in a few years.' -- AFP