Following Hillary Clinton’s visit to China, hopes are high that the Obama administration will be able to forge cooperation with China to help solve global warming. Former National Security Council official Ken Lieberthal has called for a summit on the topic between the two countries. From AP:
Kenneth Lieberthal, a China scholar and former White House adviser, laid out a blueprint of different ways the two countries can collaborate on global warming in a report he co-authored for the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
“The U.S. clearly wants to increase the level, intensity, transparency and consistency of its dialogue with China,” he told a forum at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “Climate change will be an important part of that strategic dialogue.”
Earlier this month, during her first visit to China as the top U.S. diplomat, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton repeatedly emphasized climate change and clean energy as areas in which the two countries can focus joint efforts.
For more on this topic, see “Common Challenge, Collaborative Response: A Roadmap for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change” from Asia Society.
For more on reactions to Clinton’s visit and ideas about what should be the focus of the U.S.-China relationship under Obama, see this debate hosted by the New York Times.
See also “Hillary in China: Winning Friends — But Not Influencing People” from the Huffington Post:
Secretary Clinton will no doubt be welcomed back to China in the future. The question is whether or not she is willing to step away from a crumbling paradigm of U.S.-China relations and provide the reset of the relationship that both countries desperately need to move forward, both during a time of massive economic uncertainty and beyond. The election of President Obama was about change. It is comforting to think that the “good old” U.S.-China relationship is something we can all cling to in this moment of global uncertainty. However, the failure to grasp how and why that relationship needs to change could very well create the instability we are trying to avoid.
