2:27 P.M. PDT
MR. RHODES: Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming to this briefing to wrap up the meetings over the last two days between President Obama and President Xi. I’ll turn it over here to our National Security Advisor Tom Donilon to give a readout of those meetings. Afterwards we’ll take questions.
Tom, of course, has been very focused on this China meeting as a lead person for the President on U.S.-China relations, so he can speak to anything associated with that or other foreign policy questions. I’m happy to also take questions on the FISA-related stories that have been in the news recently. In that regard, I would draw your attention to a fact sheet that we sent to our press on the collection of intelligence pursuant to Section 702 of FISA, as it provides a very good baseline of details on that program.
But with that, I’ll turn it over to Tom to give you an opening presentation. Then we’ll take questions.
MR. DONILON: Thank you, Ben. Good afternoon, everybody. I’m sorry to be a little late. I wanted to talk today about the quite unique and important meetings that took place between President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China over the last couple of days here in California.
I’d say at the outset that the President had very good discussions in an informal atmosphere, uniquely informal atmosphere, with President Xi over the last two days. The discussions were positive and constructive, wide-ranging and quite successful in achieving the goals that we set forth for this meeting.
Before I turn to the specifics on the meeting, I wanted to give some context for this. The meeting, of course, is an important part of the President’s broad national security strategy we’ve outlined since the beginning of this administration, underscoring the importance of the United States having productive and constructive relationships with the important powers in the world. And our strategic observation that if those relationships are constructive and productive, then in fact the United States could more effectively pursue its national interest and that we could, with others, solve global problems more effectively.
This meeting is also central to our Asia Pacific rebalancing strategy. As I’ve said many times, the President believes that Asia’s future and the future of the United States are deeply and increasingly linked, and we judged early during our term in office — actually during the transition — that we were under-weighted in Asia, and we had been over-weighted in other parts of the world in the prior six or seven years, particularly with respect to our military operations in the Middle East and in South Asia.
So we undertook a determined strategy aimed at sustaining a stable security environment …read more
Source: White House Press Office
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