When 200 Hawaii-based Marines arrived in April at the frontier port and military outpost of Darwin in northern Australia, the argument grew about the Obama administration’s vow to increase the U.S. military presence in Asia.

China had already expressed anger months earlier about what it called President Barack Obama’s move to “harm China,” and its risk at getting “caught in the cross-fire” of what some predicted would become a new cold war.

Just last weekend, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said in a keynote speech in Singapore that the “pivot” to the western Pacific and East Asia that Obama promised represents a significant new undertaking: “Our effort to renew and intensify our involvement in Asia is fully compatible — fully compatible — with the development and growth of China. Indeed, increased U.S. involvement in this region will benefit China as it advances our security and prosperity for the future.”

Charles E. Morrison, president of the East-West Center based in Honolulu, takes a decidedly diplomatic tack on the situation.

“I think it depends a lot on (Asian) domestic forces in each area, and how they see it,” he said, “but the Chinese I come in contact with are not complaining vigorously about U.S. forces in Darwin, Australia.”

That is not what’s been heard by Mark J. Valencia of Kaneohe, a senior associate of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability and for 26 years a senior fellow at the East-West Center.

As officials in member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations see it, Valencia said, the U.S. military move “upsets the whole applecart and puts them square in the middle of a political struggle between China and the U.S., which I think will only intensify and get worse.”

Ralph A. Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic International Studies in Honolulu, added: “The Chinese complain that this is part of our encirclement strategy, but the reality is Darwin is 2,500 miles from the closest landmass. This would be like surrounding San Francisco from Honolulu.”

The recently deployed Hawaii Marines are playing an opening role in the larger policy equation, which will eventually rotate 2,500 U.S. Marines to Australia facilities for training.

“I think Hawaii’s role is absolutely central and I think that will be increasingly the case,” Morrison said. “It seems to me that coordination becomes all that more critical and Hawaii in some ways I think even more than before, as a central place.”

Obama announced to the Australian Parliament following November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Honolulu that the U.S. Marines in Australia would shore up alliances in response to wishes of democratic allies in the region, from Japan to India.

“The notion that we fear China is mistaken; the notion that we are looking to exclude China is mistaken,” Obama said, although the U.S. and Pacific Rim nations are also negotiating to create a free-trade block, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to the exclusion of China, the world’s largest exporter and producer of manufactured goods.

In January, the White House issued “Priorities for the 21st Century Defense,” comprising what Obama stated will “focus on a broader range of challenges and opportunities, including the security and prosperity of the Asia Pacific.”

The assignment of Marines to Darwin was to use Australian facilities, rather than creating an American military base, for joint training and exercises. While the first unit consists of a six-month deployment of Fox Company of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment from Hawaii, the full deployment of 2,500 Marines “is not going to happen probably for another several years,” said a Marine Corps Forces Pacific spokesman. “It’s going to be a slow and steady buildup to that number. They’ll be coming from all around the Marine Corps.”

Morrison acknowledged that analysts in both the U.S. and China may interpret the policy as a potential cold war, “but I don’t think that’s a necessary conclusion from it. It depends on what else is going on in U.S.-China relations, and the economic relationship is flourishing.”

He added that the recent handling of Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal advocate who was given refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing and approval to enter New York University, “showed maturity in the U.S.-China relationship.”

The U.S. had “a much more military presence” in the world during the Cold War period with the Soviet Union, especially during the Korean and Vietnam wars, Morrison said. “I think it’s shifting back, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to an aggressive posturing. It could also equate to maintaining a very traditional U.S. stabilizing posture for the region as a whole.”

Valencia regards the U.S. move as far more clumsy than that, as it caught many Asian countries unprepared.

“Not only was I surprised — I’m on the sidelines — but badly, some countries were surprised. They had not been consulted.”

While the U.S. claimed to have consulted Indonesia, “I’m not so sure they did. If they did it certainly wasn’t shared around, particularly to the head of the military.

“The U.S. is the only superpower, such a powerful nation both militarily and economically, and when it leads, it leads with a foot,” Valencia said. In this case, “I think it’s both. It’s certainly economic, but the U.S. move has been largely military so far. It’s understandable for China to be suspicious of the move and prepare to defend itself.

“The ‘cold war’ is not the right term anymore,” he said, “but more of a political and economic and in some ways a strategic struggle between China and the United States, and for getting some of these smaller countries on sides, and it will intensify.”

Valencia said he is disappointed with Obama, who he said has failed to lead as promised. “We as the lone surviving superpower had a great opportunity to truly remake the world more in our image, yes, but in the image of democracy, of fair treatment, listening to others, cooperation, to the very rhetoric that his platform stated, and that just hasn’t been the case.”

Instead, he said, under Obama’s general foreign policy, “We have become aggressive, very assertive and kind of our-way-or-the-highway type of situation.”

Representatives of the Obama administration, “when I hear them speaking in international forums, have never accepted Obama and his mindset, or supposed mindset, as president,” Valencia said. “They continue on as if they were representing (George W.) Bush or even (Ronald) Reagan. I mean it’s quite amazing to listen to.”

The Pacific Forum’s Cossa was less harsh, calling Obama’s new strategic guidance for the Pentagon as “the right policy at the right time. The shift in focus toward Asia began with George H.W. Bush in 1989 but got sidetracked during the W. (Bush) era, given preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan. This strategic guidance helps to ‘rebalance’ U.S. forces toward the area that is of long-term importance and concern.”