WASHINGTON: At the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama forced himself into a room where the then Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was holding a secret meeting with the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other leaders.
Giving a blow by blow account of the incident, of which she was part as the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton in her memoirs 'Hard Choices' writes that the purpose of China was to isolate the United States by bringing together countries like India, Brazil and South Africa on its side.
But Obama's determination and presence of mind thwarted such a move, she writes.
"President Obama and I were looking for Premier Wen Jiabao in the middle of a large international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark," she recalls.
"We knew that the only way to achieve a meaningful agreement on climate change was for leaders of the nation's emitting the most greenhouse gases to sit down together and hammer out a compromise- especially the U.S. and China," she said. "But the Chinese were avoiding us."
"Worse, we learned that Wen had called a 'secret' meeting with the Indians, Brazilians, and South Africans to stop, or at least dilute, the kind of agreement the United States was seeking. When we couldn't find any of the leaders of those countries, we knew something was amiss and sent out members of our team to canvass the conference center," she writes.
