Trump, Xi and Putin loom over Asean week packed with high stakes

Detailed summary

Global leaders are set to descend on Asia for a series of high-stakes meetings that will tackle everything from AI to trade to, potentially, ...

MANILA, Nov 12 — Global leaders are set to descend on Asia for a series of high-stakes meetings that will tackle everything from AI to trade to, potentially, nuclear disarmament.

The 11-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) opens its final leaders’ summit of the year on Sunday in Manila, while French President Emmanuel Macron attends a Francophonie summit in Phnom Penh.

Focus then shifts north for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) conference in Shenzhen.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to be a key figure at Apec, while India’s Narendra Modi will be attending the Asean meet.

US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will travel to both.

Analysts told AFP that the bruising midterm election defeat Trump recently suffered will not appreciably change how the US president is perceived.

“I don’t think the region will see him as a lame duck,” Siew Mun Tang, former head of the Asean Studies Centre at Singapore’s Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, told AFP.

The agenda for a proposed sit-down between China’s Xi Jinping, Trump and Putin may remain a mystery, but no meeting at the APEC conference will attract more attention.

While Putin has pushed for talks on Ukraine, Trump this week suggested the focus would be on denuclearisation and ending his faltering war in Iran.

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