Trade war in focus at ASEAN summit ahead of Trump’s arrival

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Southeast Asian leaders grapple with the US trade war and regional flashpoints at a key summit in Manila ahead of US President Donald Trump’s arrival. Read More:…

A key regional summit opened Sunday in Manila, with Southeast Asian heads of state grappling with the Middle East crisis and their own regional flashpoints, as well as global leaders finding common ground over US President Donald Trump’s trade war.

Trump is scheduled to arrive Tuesday, near the summit’s conclusion, a visit that will include a meeting with the leaders of his fellow Quad countries — India, Japan and Australia — the first such sit-down of his second term.

But it was the US leader’s tariff blizzard that Brazil’s newly re-elected President Luiz da Silva had on his mind Sunday in Manila.

“Brazil has learned an extraordinary lesson after the US decided to impose tariffs (on other countries),” he told reporters on the sidelines of the 11-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit.

“Instead of weeping or begging the US Government … to have pity on us, we decided to look for other partners for us to sell and for us to buy from,” he said, noting his country’s trade with regional states Indonesia and Vietnam had jumped 15 and 13 per cent, respectively.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney sounded a similar note at the summit a day earlier while touting a new Philippine free-trade deal and ASEAN trade talks he said had been “substantially concluded.”

The two pacts were “part of a strategy of developing a dense web of reliable partners to create more opportunities … and reducing our relative reliance on the United States,” Carney said.

Lula told reporters he had met with Carney on the summit’s sidelines, inviting him to make an official visit to Brazil, and that he hoped to double trade with Canada.

Nearly 20,000 police officers have been deployed around Metro Manila for the summit, with progressive groups predicting a turnout of thousands on Tuesday for an anti-Trump march on the summit site.

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