JOSH LEDERMAN and KATHLEEN HENNESSEY,Associated Press 29 minutes ago
VIENTIANE, Laos (AP) — President Barack Obama called off a planned meeting Tuesday with new Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, seeking distance from a U.S. ally's leader during a diplomatic tour that's put Obama in close quarters with a cast of contentious world figures.
It's unusual for one president to tell another what to say or not say, and much rarer to call the other a "son of a bitch." Duterte managed to do both just before flying to Laos for a regional summit, warning Obama not to challenge him over extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.
"Clearly, he's a colorful guy," Obama said. "What I've instructed my team to do is talk to their Philippine counterparts to find out is this in fact a time where we can have some constructive, productive conversations."
Early Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said the meeting with Duterte was off.
Duterte has been under intense global scrutiny over the more than 2,000 suspected drug dealers and users killed since he took office. Obama had said he planned to raise the issue in his first meeting with Duterte, but the Philippine leader insisted he was only listening to his own country's people.
"You must be respectful," Duterte said of Obama. "Do not just throw questions." Using the Tagalog phrase for "son of a bitch," he said, "Putang ina I will swear at you in that forum." He made the comment in a televised news conference in southern Davao City.
Eager to show he wouldn't yield, Obama said he would "undoubtedly" still bring up human rights and due process concerns "if and when" the two do meet.
A public break with the Philippines would put Obama in a tough position, given the Southeast Asian nation's status as a longtime U.S. treaty ally. A key part of Obama's signature policy of engagement with Asia has been stronger military ties to Manila, including a defense pact the two allies signed in 2014 allowing U.S. forces to be based temporarily in designated Philippine military camps.
Yet when it comes to Duterte, the Obama administration has sought to compartmentalize. Obama administration officials said they were confident military and other cooperation with the Philippines won't be jeopardized despite misgivings about the country's new leader.
The bizarre rift with Duterte was the most glaring example of how Obama has frequently found himself bound to foreign countries and leaders whose ties to the U.S. are critical even if their values sharply diverge.
In Hangzhou this week, Obama's first stop in Asia, he heaped praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping for hosting the Group of 20 economic summit in his country, an authoritarian state long accused of human rights violations. Upon Obama's arrival, social media exploded with speculation China had slighted Obama after there was no staircase awaiting him on the tarmac, forcing the president to deplane through a set of internal stairs he rarely uses.
But U.S. officials said the incident actually stemmed more from a mix-up over finding a driver for the staircase-on-wheels who could communicate in English with the U.S. Secret Service. The officials requested anonymity to describe private diplomatic arrangements.
Obama's next stop was another one-party communist country with a dismal rights record: Laos, where mysterious disappearances have fueled concerns about a government crackdown.
And sitting down with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Obama made no mention in public of the roughly 35,000 people Erdogan's government detained following the summer's failed coup in Turkey. Instead, he worked to reassure the NATO ally the U.S. would help bring to justice whoever was responsible for plotting the coup.
Obama also spent about 90 minutes Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, another leader whose fate seems intertwined with Obama's in all the wrong ways. On opposing sides of many global issues, the U.S. and Russia are nonetheless trying to broker a deal to address the Syrian civil war and perhaps even partner militarily there.
"President Putin's less colorful," Obama said, comparing him with Duterte. "But typically the tone of our meetings is candid, blunt, businesslike."
Managing Duterte has become a worsening headache for Obama since the Filipino took office on June 30, pledging his foreign policy wouldn't be constricted by reliance on the U.S. Washington has tried largely to look the other way as Duterte has pursued closer relations with China, a marked shift for the Philippines considering recent tensions over Beijing's aspirations in the South China Sea.
This isn't the first time Duterte's penchant for eyebrow-raising comments has triggered diplomatic disputes.
Last month, Duterte said he didn't mind Secretary of State John Kerry but "had a feud with his gay ambassador - son of a bitch, I'm annoyed with that guy." He applied the same moniker to an Australian missionary who was gang-raped and killed, and even to Pope Francis, even though the Philippines is a heavily Catholic nation. He later apologized.
With a reputation as a tough-on-crime former mayor, Duterte has alarmed human rights groups with his deadly campaign against drugs, which Duterte has described as a harsh war. He has said the battle doesn't amount to genocide but has vowed to go to jail if needed to defend police and military members carrying out his orders.
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KATHLEEN HENNESSEY and JOSH LEDERMAN,Associated Press 10 hours ago
VIENTIANE, Laos (AP) — President Barack Obama on Monday became the first sitting U.S. president to step foot in the isolated Southeast Asian nation of Laos, opening a three-day visit meant to rebuild trust and close a dark chapter in the shared history between the two countries.
Obama exited the main door of Air Force One, clutching a black umbrella in the evening rain in Vientiane, the capital, before the motorcade whisked him away.
Obama is one of several world leaders coming to the country of nearly 7 million people, where the one-party communist state tightly controls public expression but is using its moment in the spotlight as host of the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to open up to outsiders.
The visit comes during what is probably Obama's final trip as president to Southeast Asia, a region that has enjoyed intense attention from the U.S. during his tenure. Obama's frequent visits to oft-ignored corners of the Asia Pacific have been central to his strategy for countering China's growing dominance in the region. By bolstering diplomatic ties in Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar, the Obama administration has declared it wants to compete for influence and market access in China's backyard.
In Laos, Obama will wrestle with the ghosts of past U.S. policies.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. rained bombs on Laotian villages and the countryside as America's war with Vietnam spilled across the border. The Laotian government estimates that more than 2 million tons of ordnance were released during more than 500,000 missions — one bomb every eight minutes for nine years.
An estimated 80 million cluster bombs did not explode, leaving tennis ball-sized "bombies" littering the impoverished countryside to wound and kill unsuspecting people.
Obama planned to acknowledge this history and its damaging effect on Laos' development, tourism and agriculture. He is expected to announce additional aid to clean up unexploded ordnance, while the Laotian government is expected to offer help in accounting for missing and dead U.S. service members.
Obama said Monday in China, before he departed for Laos, that diplomatic work on war legacy issues will be "a show of good faith on the part of the country and a way for us to move into a next phase of a relationship."
He cited Vietnam as the model. Aides said Obama's visit will probably echo a stop in Hanoi, Vietnam, in May, when the president declared he was "mindful of the past, mindful of our difficult history, but focused on the future."
In Laos, as he has across Southeast Asia, he'll hold a town-hall-style event for young people. The White House said he'll encourage Laos' slow political opening and budding entrepreneurial culture.
Obama will be speaking to people like 33-year-old Anysay Keola, who remembers his mother's stories of running and hiding from the bombs and of memorizing a phrase roughly translating to: "The U.S. dropped the bomb on us."
But Keola, an entrepreneur and filmmaker and part of Vientiane's growing creative class, also grew up on American music and fashion. The war's ill will faded long ago, and his friends are excited about Obama's arrival but not necessarily for political reasons.
"He is perceived as like a celebrity," Keola said. "It's just on the surface: 'Ooh, Obama's coming. Ooh, big plane.' Or things like that. Or his Cadillac car is here. Those are the things that people share and talk about."
While the U.S. is known as a rich country with an outsized cultural influence, China, by contrast, is seen as the huge neighbor helping to spur this small nation's robust growth. Massive Vientiane construction sites come adorned with Mandarin script. China has committed to financing a $7 billion high-speed railroad to bisect the country.
Though Laos' new president, Bounnhang Vorachit, is seen as edging closer to Vietnam than to China, the country has managed a diplomatic two-step this year. As chair of the Southeast Asian nations' group, it has projected neutrality in other countries' disputes with China over the South China Sea.
Obama is due to meet Vorachit on Tuesday.
David Reid,CNBC 17 hours ago
A tweet posted on the US Defense Intelligence Agency's Twitter account is prolonging tension between China and the United States at the G-20 in China.
According to the Wall Street Journal the tweet, which has subsequently been deleted, reportedly read: "Classy as always China" and offered Twitter users a link through to a New York Times article on the confusion over US president Barack Obama's arrival at the summit.
When Obama touched down in Hangzhou, there was no set of stairs or red carpet, forcing the U.S. president to leave the Air Force One through the back exit.
At the same time Chinese officials refused to allow reporters and photographers beyond a cordon, preventing them from witnessing Obama's arrival.
The original tweet is no longer on the Twitter feed but the latest posting from the spy unit offers an apology.
"Earlier today, a tweet regarding a news article was mistakenly posted from this account & does not represent the views of DIA. We apologize."
Alex Lockie,Business Insider Sun, Sep 4 11:00 AM PDT
In a recent interview with National Interest, Dave Majumdar asked Adm. John Richardson point blank if US aircraft carriers could operate inside China or Russia's supposed anti-access area denial (A2/AD) zones.
The answer was clear — "Yes."
"This A2/AD, well, it’s certainly a goal for some of our competitors, but achieving that goal is much different and much more complicated,” said Richardson in the interview.
Asked how the Navy would protect carriers, Richardson declined to say exactly for security reasons, but answered generally:
“It’s really a suite of capabilities, but I actually think we’re talking too much in the open about some of the things we’re doing, so I want to be thoughtful about how we talk about things so we don’t give any of our competitors an advantage.”
The Chinese on the other hand, talk openly about the "carrier killer" DF-21D, an indigenously created, precision-guided missile capable of sinking a US aircraft carrier with a single shot and that has a phenomenal range of up to 810 nautical miles, while US carriers' longest-range missiles can travel only about 550 miles.
Therefore, on paper, the Chinese can deny aircraft carriers the luxury of wading off of their shores and force them to operate outside of their effective range.
But Richardson contested that notion when speaking at a Center for a New American Security in June.
"I think there is this long-range precision-strike capability, certainly," Richardson acknowledged. But "A2/AD is sort of an aspiration. In actual execution, it's much more difficult."
China's intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities (ISR), bolstered by a massive modernization push and advanced radar installations on the reclaimed islands in the South China Sea, have theoretically given them the ability to project power for hundreds of miles.
"The combination of ubiquitous ISR, long-range precision-strike weapons takes that to another level and demands a response," said Richardson, adding that China's extension into the Pacific created a "suite of capabilities" that were of "pressing concern."
But the US Navy won't be defeated or deterred by figures on paper.
Richardson said:
"In the cleanest form, the uninterrupted, frictionless plane, you have the ability to sense a target much more capably and quickly around the world. You've got the ability, then, to transmit that information back to a weapon system that can reach out at a fairly long range and it is precision-guided ... You're talking about hundreds of miles now, so that raises a challenge."
"Our response would be to inject a lot of friction into that system at every step of the way [and] look to make that much more difficult," he continued.
Richardson was clear that China's purported capabilities were only speculations.
"What you see often is a display of, 'Here's this launcher. Here's a circle with a radius of 700 miles, and it's solid-color black inside' ... And that's just not the reality of the situation," he said.
"You've got this highly maneuverable force that has a suite of capabilities that the force can bring to bear to inject uncertainty," Richardson continued.
So at the present moment, it seems the US Navy can still travel the globe in confidence, and with the adoption of the F-35C and the MQ-25 Stingray, which both bring their own game-changing technologies, the balance appears ready to tip even more in the US's favor.
The Huffington Post 20 hours ago
VOA News 6 hours ago
U.S. President Barack Obama's three-day visit to Laos this week shows how far the Southeast Asian country of nearly 7 million people has stepped out of the shadows of its influential neighbors, China and Vietnam. Since the days of French colonial Indochina, Laos has been politically and culturally influenced by Vietnam. By the time of the 1975 communist revolution, most Lao party officials had spent a substantial period of time in Vietnam and many even spoke fluent Vietnamese. However, Nguyen Ngoc Truong, a former Vietnamese senior diplomat who runs a foreign policy think tank, said Hanoi today considers Laos "a very important neighbor" — even if China's enormous development aid packages in Laos appear to give Beijing the upper hand. ...