After repeatedly calling Trump “uniquely unqualified” throughout the 2016 campaigning cycle, Obama is now set to embark on his last official foreign trip as commander-in-chief and must explain to anxious foreign leaders what the 2016 presidential election means for U.S. foreign policy going forward. Per Bloomberg, Obama’s trip will include visits with the leaders of China, Germany, U.K., Peru, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Australia and several Southeast Asian nations all of whom will be peppering him with questions ranging from the fate of various trade deals to the Syrian refugee crisis.
“His role now becomes a bridge to an administration with which he has very different views,” said Patrick Cronin, senior adviser for the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “He’s got to reassure the global community that what’s coming next will not lead to complete fragmentation and a breakdown of order.”
“I don’t know there’s much he could say to effectively calm their anxieties,” Miller said in a telephone interview. “But I certainly expect that he’ll offer reassurances, most likely by highlighting the strong fundamentals of our relationships.”
The task is made more difficult because Obama campaigned vigorously against Trump’s election, declaring at a series of rallies that the billionaire was “uniquely unqualified” to be president and “temperamentally unfit” to hold the codes to America’s nuclear arsenal.
Although Obama expected a simple victory lap for his last foreign trip, we suspect that he will now be facing a hostile crowd with pointed questions about a man he once promised would never be president. Obama’s entire foreign policy legacy hangs in the balance as Trump has threatened to unravel almost all of his policies including a multi-nation deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, various international trade agreements and a lax policy toward acceptance of Syrian refugees.
“The election will be the primary topic on people’s minds everywhere we go,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser — especially “given the direction the election took.”
Trump has also said he would abandon the Paris accord on climate change and look to renegotiate or scrap various international trade deals. He’s also vowed new approaches to the fight against Islamic State and the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Africa. Obama is sure to face pointed questions about a man he once promised them would never be president.
Germany’s Angela Merkel, Obama’s closest international partner throughout his presidency, and China’s Xi Jinping, whose relationship with Obama is complicated and of enormous consequence, have some of the highest stakes in Trump’s ascendance. Trump has said the U.S. will close its borders to refugees from the Syrian civil war, putting him at odds with Merkel, who has made Germany a haven for displaced peoples. Trump has said he would declare China a currency manipulator, a step the Obama administration never took despite deep economic differences with the country.
Obama’s trip to Peru, which includes a meeting at that Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, was anticipated to be victory lap for his Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement though he’ll now be met with angst from the leaders of the agreement’s 12 participants who will be curious where relations with the U.S. will go from here.
In Peru, Obama will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, a meeting of 21 Pacific Rim governments. Obama once hoped he would arrive at the event able to boast of congressional ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation free trade agreement involving many of the group’s members. Trump dashed those dreams, campaigning in adamant opposition to the TPP, and Republican congressional leaders have all but ruled out ratifying it before the president-elect’s inauguration.
Now, Obama will meet with a series of nervous world leaders demanding answers about how Trump’s victory may affect their relations with the U.S., said Meredith Miller, vice president of Albright Stonebridge Group and a former official at the State Department’s Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs.
As the NY Post summarizes, “In a moment of deep shock and depression in Europe — the US was not supposed to elect Donald Trump — this visit has become a kind of group therapy by which European leaders will try to reassure themselves that the America we know won’t disappear.”
Sorry Mr. President, it looks like this trip is going to be mostly business…but luckily you’re near retirement.
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