(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)(WASHINGTON) — President Obama’s final foreign trip as the United States’ head of state this week had been planned as a way to reassure foreign leaders the wake of a contentious presidential campaign. But the tone and message of the president’s upcoming farewell tour has shifted along with the suprise election of Donald Trump.
As he travels to Greece, Germany and the APEC Summit in Peru this week, the White House is preparing for Trump to loom large over the trip every stop of the way.
“We certainly expect that the election will be the primary topic on people’s minds everywhere we go. I think frankly, that would’ve been the case no matter what the result, but I, think that will be even more so the case given the direction that the election took,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters Friday.
Rhodes said the president will want to use his conversations with foreign leaders to focus on shared values and the common interest among allies in the success of the next American administration.
“No matter our preferred choice may have been in the election, right now we as Americans have a stake in seeing this incoming administration succeed, and frankly, the world has a stake in seeing America succeed, given the leadership role that we play,” Rhodes said.
But even as the White House seeks to bring about a smooth transition, there are many questions that President Obama simply won’t be able to answer in foreign leaders who may look to him for reassurance.
“In some ways there’s nothing to say,” Heather Conley, the senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters last week.
“There is really nothing President Obama can do on that front. That’s going to have to wait for this transition to happen,” said Conley, who said the trip now takes on a “sobering tone.”
World leaders are “very concerned,” Conley said, with key areas of international cooperation such as trade agreements, the future of NATO, and cooperation on climate change now up in the air.
“The president has the unenviable task of telling his counterparts and explaining what Europeans are now calling the Trump effect and they are very worried,” Conley said, noting that Europe is similarly wrangling with populist sentiment, as was the case with the U.K.’s Brexit vote.
While the president’s public message will likely resemble the words of unity and graciousness heard from his Rose Garden remarks Wednesday, Conley said whatever private reassurance the president can offer world leaders will likely be on the strength of U.S. institutions.
The “sobering tone” that Conley predicts for the trip will likely be on display during the first stop in Athens, Greece — symbolic as the birthplace of democracy.
“Part of the decision to visit Athens was to deliver a major speech on the state of liberal democracies,” she said. “But I think this places the speech and the context in a more sobering note.”
The White House has said that the president’s speech was not edited as a result of the election — having not been drafted ahead of last Tuesday — but Rhodes hinted that the president will address the U.S. election within the context of a broader reflection on the forces — both positive and challenged — brought about by globalization.
The sedated message will continue, she said, when the president moves onto Berlin, in what is the president’s sixth trip to Germany.
“The design of trip was supposed to give reassurance that we made it through this campaign and we’re going to come out alright. We just have a different scenario now,” Conley said.
The White House singles German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the president’s closest foreign partner, having worked with Merkel on virtually every foreign issue over his eight years in the White House.
The warm relations now enjoyed between the US and German leaders is set to take a very different tone, after Trump accused the German leader during the campaign of “ruining Germany” — a criticism he later tempered when he called Merkel a great international leader apart from “the whole immigration thing.”
After his stop in Germany, President Obama will make his way to Lima, Peru, for the final leg of his trip and his final APEC Leaders’ Summit, where the focus will be on trans-Pacific trade.
Even though the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, deal that President Obama had advocated for is sure to see the chopping block under a Trump administration, the White House plans to continue making its case for the benefits of the deal — with a warning that the opportunity to lead in the Asian trading region may now fall to China.
“We continue to think that these types of deals make sense, simply because countries like China are not going to stop working on regional agreements,” Rhodes said. “They’re continuing to work on RCEP and on signing trade agreements that would lower the standards in the Asia Pacific that would make it harder for our firms and our workers to compete on a level playing field, which we think is ultimately important to growing our economy.”
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