Barack Obama wades into a noodle soup of Asian multilateral groups when he arrives in Singapore late on Friday in a policy of direct engagement with regional bodies that is intended to draw a line under the George W. Bush years.

But the new approach, which includes the first ever meeting between a US president and the heads of the 10-member Association of South East Asian nations, is also potentially hazardous. Since Burma is a member of Asean, Mr Obama will become the first US president to meet Thein Sein, prime minister of Burma, a senior member of the ruling junta.

US officials on Friday faced ticklish questions over whether Mr Obama would take steps tomorrow to avoid being in a photo with Mr Sein. “We’re not going to discuss photos that haven’t been taken,” said a senior official.

The officials added that the Obama administration had chosen to engage with the Burmese, while maintaining tight economic sanctions on the country, in the hope of boosting the chances of restoring democracy to the country when it holds what are expected to be another round of rigged elections in 2010.

Human Rights Watch, the US-based campaign group, urged Mr Obama to make human rights in Burma, and throughout the region, his top priority. “Asean leaders have long sent mixed messages on Burma, so Obama should encourage them to unite in a strong statement of support for real democratic reforms,” said Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director of HRW.

Mr Obama is likely to follow the Asean leaders in calling for credible elections in Burma next year, and for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the veteran opposition leader.

But the reality is that Burma has been sidelined as an issue in order to allow the US to re-engage with Asean, a region of 580m people with a combined gross domestic product bigger than India’s. The US has never held a summit with Asean, mainly because such a meeting could not be held without putting a US president in the same room as a senior representative of Burma.

Perhaps more important in US eyes will be Mr Obama’s separate meeting in Singapore with Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of Indonesia, a country in which the US president spent four years of his childhood and which he has pledged to visit next year.

Officials say Mr Obama sees Indonesia as a lynchpin of America’s renewed “outreach” to Asia against the backdrop of a China that is moving rapidly ahead to forge stronger trade, economic and infrastructural links with countries throughout the region.

Although never stated baldly, the underlying assumption is that the US needs to take rapid steps to match China’s increasingly tentacular reach following eight years of what officials describe as neglect for the region under Mr Bush.

One such test will be in the evolution of the debate over the creation of an East Asian Community – a body from which China is thought to want to exclude the US, while Japan is pushing for its inclusion.

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