ANALYSIS - Obama in Asia - building block or bow?

By Patricia Zengerle and Caren Bohan

SEOUL (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama arrives home on Thursday with no big policy breakthroughs after more than a week in Asia trying to recast the U.S. relationship with a dynamic region.

Critics in Washington complained that Obama was too accommodating to foreign leaders during his four-country, eight-day trip -- particularly in China and in Japan, where his low bow to the Emperor raised eyebrows in the United States.

They say he failed to achieve concrete results on trade, economic issues and human rights and questioned what had happened to the Obamamania that greeted the president on earlier trips to Europe.

"We didn't come halfway across the world for tickertape parades," said Obama senior adviser David Axelrod. "We came here to lay a foundation for progress. We've done that."

Yet, Obama seemed to accede to China's efforts to control his visit there. Observers took Beijing's lack of public concessions as an indication that Obama -- facing crushing national debt and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- lacks bargaining power with the largest holder of U.S. foreign debt.

"I would characterize the press coverage in the United States as being somewhere between skeptical and negative," said William Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"The (press) consensus has been that the White House proceeded on this trip without a very clear game plan and to the extent that it did go with a list of concerns, very few of them were met."

The Democratic leader also left behind pressing challenges at home -- economic worries, vehement Republican opposition to his plans to reform healthcare and a wrenching decision on how many more U.S. troops to commit to the war in Afghanistan.