Obama and Rousseff focus on climate, play down spy row
Obama hails statusconscious Brazil as not just a regional player but a ‘global power’
US President Barack Obama and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff traded compliments and vowed to work together on renewable energy on Tuesday, bidding to put a bitter spying row behind them.
The pair met for extensive White House talks, a meeting originally planned for 2013 but scuppered by revelations the National Security Agency eavesdropped on Rousseff’s calls.
Turning on the charm, Obama hailed status-conscious Brazil as not just a regional player but a “global power,” while praising Rousseff as an adept and “reliable partner.”
Rousseff — whose domestic approval ratings are close to single digits — extended an invitation for Obama to visit the 2016 Rio Olympics and indicated the NSA scandal was in the past.
“Some things have changed ... I believe President Obama,” she said when asked about assurances that the United States would no longer spy on leaders in allied countries.
“He has told me that, should he ever need non-public information about Brazil, he would just pick up the phone and call me.”
In New York, she called on investors to embrace an economy that is the largest in Latin America and the seventh largest in the world — but one that is expected to shrink by about 1.2 per cent this year.
She will hope that playing on the world stage with a US president — who now has approval ratings at about 50 per cent for the first time in years — will provide a much-needed boost.
The pair rolled out a litany of unoffensive economic, political and military agreements ranging from work on patents to food security in Africa.
But they also unveiled ambitious joint renewable energy targets, hoping to present a collective front ahead of crunch global climate talks later this year.