In Japan for G-8 Meeting, Bush Defends Olympic Move

President Bush with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda of Japan on the island of Hokkaido on Sunday.

News from The New York Times

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: July 7, 2008

RUSUTSU, Japan — President Bush arrived on the mountainous northern Japanese island of Hokkaido on Sunday to talk to world leaders about climate change, soaring oil and gas prices and aid to Africa. But first he defended his decision to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing next month — and he got a little help from his host, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who announced he would go, too.

“I view the Olympics as an opportunity for me to cheer on our athletes,” Mr. Bush said at a news conference in nearby Toyako after the two leaders met privately. He said not going to the ceremony “would be an affront to the Chinese people” that might make it “more difficult to be able to speak frankly with the Chinese leadership.”

Human rights advocates have been urging a boycott of the Games to protest China’s crackdown on antigovernment protests in Tibet and its support of the government in Sudan.

Other world leaders, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, are skipping the opening ceremonies. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has said he may stay home as well, although French news reports said over the weekend that he was about to announce that he would attend.

But Mr. Fukuda said, “I don’t think you have to really link Olympics with politics.”

Mr. Bush’s visit to the scenic hot springs resort at Toyako, where the leaders are gathering, is his last meeting as president with the leaders of industrialized nations, the Group of 8, and the beginning of his exit from the world stage. It also comes as other nations are frustrated with the United States over the weak dollar and rising oil and food prices, which are threatening the global economy.

The gathering, which officially begins Monday, will feature Mr. Bush’s first meeting with Dmitri A. Medvedev since Mr. Medvedev succeeded Vladimir V. Putin as president of Russia.

Mr. Bush hopes to use his time in Hokkaido to press his fellow leaders to live up to their promises of increasing aid to Africa, a centerpiece of his own foreign policy agenda.

Climate change is another major topic; after years of pressure to confront the problem of global warming more aggressively, Mr. Bush is now hoping to lead the way to an international agreement by the end of this year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But Mr. Bush’s efforts, particularly on climate change, are complicated by the election back home. Both Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, have criticized the White House over what they regard as a lack of commitment to reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.

“Everyone’s sort of waiting for the next U.S. president,” said Alden Meyer, who is here monitoring the talks as director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group based in Washington. “Either way, you’re going to see a very different approach than President Bush.”

Mr. Fukuda has said he would like to conclude the meeting with an agreement from the countries to cut heat-trapping gases by 50 percent by 2050. But Mr. Bush has long resisted such a mandatory target unless developing nations like China and India sign on.

Before leaving for last year’s Group of 8 meeting in Germany, Mr. Bush proposed his own solution: a series of meetings among high-polluting nations in an attempt to forge an international consensus. The leaders of those countries, which include China and India, are scheduled to meet here in Hokkaido on Wednesday, and a major question among summit meeting participants is what will come out of that session.

One expert monitoring the talks here in Hokkaido, Philip E. Clapp of the Pew Environment Group, said negotiators were considering a proposal put forth by China. In it, China would agree to a long-range target for reducing emissions by 2050 in exchange for a commitment from the United States to set a “solid, aggressive target” for reducing its emissions in a shorter time frame, by 2020.

In April, Mr. Bush called for the United States to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, and Mr. Clapp said he remained hopeful that a deal could be worked out.

But at Sunday’s news conference, Mr. Bush was noncommittal, saying only that the United States was working to come up with a “constructive statement.”

Mr. Bush also used the news conference to assuage Japanese concerns about his recent decision to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism — a move that has touched a raw nerve here because of the unresolved issue of North Korea’s abduction of Japanese citizens decades ago. Mr. Bush took the step after the North’s long-delayed declaration of its nuclear program to the outside world.

But the fate of the abductees, who disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s apparently as part of an effort by the North to train Japanese-speaking spies, is a very emotional issue here, and Japan has been using its role in the so-called six-party talks with North Korea to press for the abductees’ return.

The big fear here is that Japan will lose its leverage now that the United States has removed the North from the list of sponsors of terrorism.

So Mr. Bush, saying he was “aware of the sensitivity,” made Mr. Fukuda a promise. “The United States will not abandon you on this issue,” he said.