The British, French and Germans will no doubt be flattered by the fact that Barack Obama took the trouble to visit them at the end of his I-can-be-a-commander-in-chief trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, but they shouldn’t be fooled by it. Having taken his political and personal risks in the two war zones and in Israel, he was taking the soft option by heading west to Europe. Had this been a serious effort to show that he understands the way the world is changing, he would instead have flown eastwards to Asia.

After all, Asia is home to the world’s fastest-growing big economies in China and India, to its three newest nuclear-weapons powers – India, Pakistan and North Korea – and to all the countries that will determine during the next US president’s term whether the world agrees on how to cope with climate change, on how to extend trade liberal-isation and on how to control inflation.

The Middle East has shaped George W Bush’s presidency and no one can deny that it will also be the main overseas preoccupation for his successor. Yet presidents also look for legacies as well as dealing with preoccupations. The foreign affairs legacy of President Obama or President John McCain is much likelier to be shaped by Asia than by Europe or Iraq.

The new president will have to find a way to cope with not only the increasing influence of Asia on global political and economic affairs, but also the increasing importance – and potential danger – of the political rivalries that exist within Asia. A small example of that is the state of what the Cambodian government calls “imminent war” with Thailand, which has led to thousands of troops massing either side of a disputed border. Much larger and more significant, though, are the rivalries between the three great powers of Asia – China, India and Japan.

If Obama had headed east instead of west, he would have stumbled straight into these tough issues rather than being able to address adoring crowds in Europe’s friendly cities. Had he been in India last week, he would have witnessed riotous scenes in the parliament where the governing coalition had to scramble a victory in a confidence vote, called because of fierce opposition to India’s closer ties to the United States, symbolised by a civil nuclear energy cooperation deal that still awaits full ratification.

Had he gone to China, he would have had to comment on that country’s announcement this week of how protests are going to be controlled during the Beijing Olympics next month and on China’s even tighter restrictions on business visas for foreigners, designed to prevent troublemakers in suits from getting in during August. He would also have had to pass comment on China’s overtaking of America as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Three issues in Asia will be, or should be, high on the new president’s briefings when he enters office in January. In order of immediacy they are inflation, climate change and the balance-of-power politics.

The inflation that is overshadowing America and western Europe is essentially an Asian creation. It is usually summed up as being caused by rising food and energy prices. But why have those prices been rising? Because of demand in China, India and Asia’s other fast-growing countries. And behind that growth in demand lies not just economic success but also the failure to manage monetary growth properly, thanks to a determination to keep Asian currencies and exports cheap by tying them to the dollar.

Rapid money supply growth has pushed inflation to 25% in Vietnam, 7% in China and nearly 12% in India. In India, the central bank has been trying to catch up by raising interest rates and clamping down on monetary growth. But in China, where producer price indices and wages are rising faster than that 7% rate of consumer price inflation, interest rates have been kept low. The reason is that the government wants to avoid a currency revaluation; to keep the currency cheap, interest rates have to be kept low.

It is possible that this situation may have begun to change by the time the new president enters office. It is plausible to speculate that the Chinese are deferring any measures that could be controversial until after the Beijing Olympics are safely out of the way and a currency revaluation would certainly be controversial, especially among Chinese exporters.

Without a revaluation of the Chinese currency, however, there can be no serious attempt to reduce inflation and the growth of the Chinese money supply. China has huge domestic savings and its exports of capital to the rest of the world also make a difference to monetary growth and credit conditions elsewhere.

In the past 10 days the oil price has dropped back by about 15% from its peak of $145 a barrel, in part thanks to a belief that Chinese economic growth may be slowing. But that growth will have to slow a lot more and Chinese inflation come under much tighter control for the pain from costly energy really to be eased.

An American president, of course, cannot control China’s currency policy.

American congressmen have been calling for a revaluation for years. But if a new president wants to make a serious effort to forge international collaboration to reduce inflation and make energy cheaper again, he will have to get China on his side.

That is even more true with climate change. This is the issue that every presidential candidate has wanted to talk about in order to make themselves look more progressive than George Bush. But any new president would wish to defer it to avoid making tough choices in his first year in office. That wish will be disappointed as negotiations for a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol on global warming are due to take place late next year in Copenhagen.

Without American participation, Kyoto was pretty meaningless. Without serious Chinese and Indian participation, Copenhagen will be pretty meaningless, too. And unless China signs up to some commitments to cut its future emissions, it will again be difficult to get American political support for a new treaty.

The Chinese currency, inflation and climate change are, in fact, potentially linked. When in the early 1970s, at a similar stage in its industrialisation, Japan had to face up to the combination of a sharp revaluation of its currency, a clampdown on inflation and the introduction of new environmental laws, it moved within a decade from being one of the world’s dirtiest economies to being one of the cleanest. China could do the same if it sees that it is in its interest and if it feels obliged by international pressure to do so.

That effort to persuade China to become what one of Bush’s senior officials, Robert Zoellick (now president of the World Bank), called a “responsible stakeholder” in global affairs, will be complicated by the third item on the Asian briefing agenda: balance-of-power politics. In that, India plays a crucial role. That role, in American eyes, is as a counterbalance to China.

Hence the effort, begun by Bill Clinton but accelerated by Bush, to improve America’s relations with India. In 2005 Bush signed a defence pact with India along with the civil nuclear deal that caused this week’s uproar in the Indian parliament. The aim is to strengthen India’s economy, to boost the defence ties between the two countries and to legitimise India’s status as a nuclear weapons power.

The unstated but clear underlying aim is to ensure that China does not get the chance to dominate Asia as it grows bigger and stronger in economic and military terms. It is going to be a delicate business for the new president, seeking to deal cooperatively with China while also working to constrain it through an extension of America’s now bipartisan India policy.

No wonder Obama preferred Berlin, Paris and London to Beijing and Delhi. But he won’t have that luxury if he is elected president.

Bill Emmott is a former editor of The Economist. His latest book is Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, published by Allen Lane

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