When Barack Obama meets Xi Jinping this week the South China Sea is likely to feature high on the agenda as Washington seeks to counter Beijing’s increasingly assertive claims to contested waters.
But as the US president prepares to welcome his Chinese counterpart to the White House amid a confrontational mood between the two nations, one plank of his strategy lies stalled in the Supreme Court of the Philippines.
Leftwing groups in the South-east Asian country — a US treaty ally locked in a territorial dispute with China — are challenging a 10-year defence co-operation agreement signed by Mr Obama in 2014 that would allow the US military to return to bases across the Philippine archipelago.
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