President focuses on climate change and arms controlSFlb

Obama was to meet today with the leader of Russia.

SINGAPORE (AP) — President Barack Obama and nearly two dozen fellow leaders from Europe and the Asia-Pacific region agreed today that next month’s much-anticipated international climate change meetings will be merely a way station — not the once hoped-for end point — in the difficult search for a worldwide global warming treaty.

The 192-nation climate conference beginning in three weeks in Copenhagen had originally been intended to produce a new global climate-change treaty. Hopes for that have dimmed lately. But comments by Obama and fellow leaders at a hastily arranged breakfast meeting here on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit served to put the final nail in any remaining expectations for the December summit.

“There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen which starts in 22 days,” said Michael Froman, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for international economic matters.

The prime minister of Denmark, Lars Loekke Rasmussen, the U.N.-sponsored climate conference’s chairman, flew overnight to Singapore to present a proposal to the leaders to instead make the Copenhagen goal a matter of crafting a “politically binding” agreement, in hopes of rescuing some future for the badly off-track process. A fully binding legal agreement would be left to a second meeting next year in Mexico City, Froman said.

Obama backed the approach, cautioning the group not to let the “perfect be the enemy of the good,” Froman said. Obama and other leaders, including Chinese President Hu Jintao, expressed support for progress at Copenhagen. Froman said the Danish proposal would call for Copenhagen to produce “operational impact,” but he did not explain how that would work or to what it would apply.

Despite the cooperative-sounding words, the two-year process of crafting a landmark new treaty has been marked by deep distrust between rich, developed nations such as the U.S. and those in Europe, and poorer developing nations such as India, Brazil and China.

The developed nations hold that all countries must agree to legally binding targets to reduce heat-trapping gases.

Obama arrived late Saturday night in Singapore for the annual 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. His focus was more on side meetings, including one later today with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev where he hoped to nudge forward a major new arms-control pact. The two nations are in talks on a successor to a Cold War-era agreement that expires in December.

Obama also was sitting down with Indonesia’s Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of the world’s largest Muslim nation and Obama’s home as a boy.

And the president planned another milestone: joining a larger meeting that includes the leader of military-ruled Myanmar, also known as Burma. Obama is sure to face criticism at home, particularly from conservatives, for doing so — a significant step up in his administration’s new policy of “pragmatic engagement” that is a shift from years of U.S. isolation and sanctions.