President Barack Obama is going through one final diplomatic tour through Asia before his tenure is complete, and that began today with some work on battling climate change. Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping to ratify the agreement they made last year to dramatically reduce carbon emissions of their respective countries.
The United States and China are the largest carbon polluters in the world. The Paris Agreement, a worldwide treaty created by the UN last year to combat climate change, needs fifty-five countries to ratify it in order for it take effect. China and the United States are the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth countries to ratify the treaty. Obama exercised his Executive Agreement powers to sign the treaty, so he did not require the approval of congress.
In addition to ratifying the Paris Agreement, Obama hopes to use this trip to Asia and his limited remaining time in office to patch up some troubled relationships. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Obama spoke on another purpose in his trip to meet with Xi:
“Part of what I’ve tried to communicate to President Xi is that the United States arrives at its power, in part, by restraining itself… So where we see them violating international rules and norms, as we have seen in some cases in the South China Sea or in some of their behavior when it comes to economic policy, we’ve been very firm, and we’ve indicated to them that there will be consequences.”
During this trip, Obama also met with the leaders of Turkey and the Philippines. Both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte are important US allies who are currently on rocky footing with Obama. Turkey is an important ally in combating ISIS and other terrorist cells in the Middle East, but President Erdoğan has taken to harsh means to maintain his power after a failed coup in July. He has also requested extradition of a cleric currently in the United States that he believes to have been involved with the coup attempt.
The Philippines are an important counterweight to China in maintaining US interests in Asia. Newly elected Duterte, who has been nicknamed “the Donald Trump of the Philippines” by some, was elected despite a series of lewd, sexist comments. He has taken an extremely hard stance on dealing with drug traffic in the Philippines, and there have been numerous questions of human rights violations about his new regime.
Obama hopes to smooth over some of these frayed relationships while he still has time in office. Ratifying the Paris Agreement is a big step in the right direction for combating climate change, and Obama surely wants to help the next President with stronger relationships in a diplomatically important part of the world. Watch part of Obama’s pretrip interview with Fareed Zakaria here:
Feature Image Courtesy U.S. Embassy The Hague on Flickr available under a CC Attribution-NoDerivs license.
