Before Australia, Obama hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Hawaii where further progress was made toward setting up a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that excludes China, the world’s largest exporter. The pact includes Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the United States.

At a press conference on his arrival in Canberra, the Australian capital, Obama flanked Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard as the two announced the permanent “rotational deployment” of U.S. Marines near Darwin to begin next year. Darwin, Australia’s northern-most city is just a few hundred miles from Indonesia and some 2,000 miles from Singapore and the Malacca Strait—one of the most important shipping lanes in the world and vital to Pacific trade, which surpassed that of the Atlantic some two decades ago.