Climate withdrawal ‘will of people’
Tillerson indicates US will continue big role in region BAR
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson dismissed New Zealand concerns about America’s future role in the Asia-Pacific and the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, which he said reflected the will of the American people.
Prime Minister Bill English raised New Zealand’s disagreement about the decision to withdraw from the climate change accord in a meeting with Tillerson yesterday.
Tillerson was in New Zealand as an add-on to his trip to Australia, meeting English and Foreign Affairs Minister Gerry Brownlee at Premier House before jetting out again five hours after he landed.
He is the first senior member of the Trump Administration to visit New Zealand, and US media travelling with him reported people in Wellington gave the one-finger salute at his motorcade in an apparent show of disgust over the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement.
After the meeting, Tillerson fended off questions about whether the US was ceding a leadership role in the Asia-Pacific and becoming more isolationist by withdrawing from the Paris agreement and the TransPacific Partnership.
“One of the reasons I’m in the region . . . is to reaffirm to everyone that the United States views this region of the world as extremely important to both our national secur- ity interest and our own economic and prosperity interests.
“I think you can expect to see an elevated level of engagement to what you saw over the past eight years.”
Tillerson objected to suggestions US President Donald Trump was unpredictable, saying the decisions to withdraw from the TPP and the Paris accord were well signalled in the campaign. “Clearly that also represents the will of the American people. There was very little support in Congress for either TPP or the Paris accord.”
English said Tillerson was “very fluent” at explaining the US position and left him reassured about the US role in the Asia-Pacific and its commitment to regional groupings such as Apec, Asean and the Pacific Islands Forum.
“For us that’s the most important aspect discussed today — we want to see the US continue its engagement in the Asia-Pacific because it underpins our economic success ... and it underpins the settled defence and security arrangements which are at times getting a bit tense.”
English said he had not directly raised concerns about Trump’s style of leadership, but Labour leader Andrew Little said he raised Trump’s Watch a video of the visit at nzherald.co.nz conduct in his own meeting with Tillerson. He believed it was important to let senior members of the Administration know the behaviour of their boss was not helping international relations.
“We talked about the idiosyncratic nature of [Trump’s] leadership and the impact it was having on world affairs and international relations, and apparently sending a signal the US is less interested in some of those relations than perhaps they were.”
English said Tillerson had not asked anything of New Zealand but the pair had discussed counterterrorism and Isis (Islamic State).