U.S. President Barack Obama will meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday on the sidelines of the G20 summit in China, the White House said Monday. It will be their first meeting since Duterte took power in June.
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Obama will keep up the drumbeat in China, where he is attending a meeting of the Group of 20 industrial and emerging-market economies.
“And this will build on the work that we’ve done in our previous travel to Beijing, which included the historic breakthrough announcement on cooperation on climate change and also the engagements we’ve had here in Washington and Sunnylands with President Xi Jinping”, Rhodes said.
The meeting, to be held this Saturday in China, is to cover topics including climate change, the Iran nuclear deal and joint concerns regarding the Korean peninsula, according to the White House.
The trip will also include a stop in Laos, the first ever from a sitting American president.
The president plans to raise those concerns with the new leader, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Monday.
Rhodes also said China has been working together with the United States to further exert political and economic pressure on North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Following the summit, Obama will travel to Laos, the first ever USA presidential visit to the Southeast Asia country, according to Rhodes.
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Japanese Defense Minister Tomomi Inada is expected to discuss the issue with U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on Sep. 13. Ahead of the visit, the White House acknowledged the “very hard history” between the countries, alluding to the roughly 270 million cluster bombs the US dropped on Laos in the “secret war” during the Vietnam War.
