In a meeting with President Barack Obama last week, Lee Kuan Yew, the veteran former prime minister of Singapore, said he felt privileged to meet the US leader at a “time of renewal and change in America and during a period of transition where the world order is changing”.

At private meetings around Washington, however, Mr Lee's message was rather more blunt.

“You guys are giving China a free run in Asia,” he told Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The vacuum in US policy is enabling the Chinese to make the running.”

Mr Lee's timing was apposite. Thursday Mr Obama leaves for Tokyo for a regional tour that will include China, South Korea and Singapore, where Mr Lee's government is hosting a summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) forum this weekend. Surveys in each country show that Mr Obama's popularity has helped to restore the battered US standing in the region.

But the views of Asian governments do not always chime with those of their public. Across the region, concern is rising about the absence of US leadership on trade since Mr Obama took office. Few believe that he has the will or power to restart the Doha round of global trade talks – and he has not asked Congress for a renewal of the presi- dent's fast-track negotiating authority.

Fewer still believe that he will be able to ratify the landmark 2007 US-South Korea free-trade agreement in the face of strong hostility in Congress.

Last week Sander Levin, chairman of the House of Representatives' ways and means subcommittee on trade, wrote to the White House alleging that South Korea and Japan were going backwards on market opening for US automakers – a neuralgic issue for US lawmakers at a time of double-digit unemployment.

Mr Levin contrasted the US “cash for clunkers” programme, which was open to foreign vehicles on a large scale, with the closed nature of equivalent South Korean and Japanese schemes.

In South Korea's vehicle market, the foreign share has dropped from 5.3 per cent last year to 4.5 per cent so far in 2009 – similar to the figure in Japan.

“We urge you to take all the necessary steps to open the South Korean and Japanese markets to US autos,” said Mr Levin. “It is time for South Korea and Japan to treat US and other automakers fairly.”

However, while globalisation gets steadily less popular in the US, other parts of the world are moving ahead. South Korea recent- ly concluded a free-trade deal with Europe. Japan is holding similar talks with the European Union. Ironically, the EU broached the talks as a way of protecting itself against the trade- diverting effects of the now moribund US-Korea deal.

US business lobby groups are hoping Mr Obama will be able to achieve some kind of a breakthrough in Seoul next week. Given that it would be futile for him to send the free-trade agreement back to Capitol Hill, any new steps would have to include a renegotiation of the deal to include better market access for US cars.

“It is really important to understand just how badly the US is screwing itself on trade,” said Mr Bergsten. “By having an inactive trade policy, others are rushing to fill the vacuum.”

Mr Obama will have to deal with Beijing's sensitivities following his recent decision to impose import duties on Chinese tyre imports, in addition to more familiar disputes over China's lack of protection for intellectual property rights and its allegedly under-valued exchange rate.

But Washington's lack of leadership will be most keenly felt at Apec at the weekend. “You've got Asian countries engaged in negotiations throughout the region and the world – over 16 [trade] negotiations completed,” said Steve Schrage at the Centre For Strategic and International Studies.

“In contrast, you've got a United States where there are questions about a jobless recovery, and our free-trade agreement efforts are stalled.”

One possible silver lining could emerge if Mr Obama puts his weight behind the Transpacific Partnership – a group of small Apec members that hopes to set up open trade in the region.

White House officials have hinted that Mr Obama may be open to such a move which, they say, could help rekindle US economic leadership in Asia.

“Contrary to conventional wisdom we are not inactive,” said a senior official.