When President Joe Biden’s aides were planning his visit to South America this week for a pair of leaders’ summits, two vastly different scenarios were in play.
In one, Biden arrived as the confident statesman burnishing a legacy and preparing to hand off to his vice president. In the other, he was faced with anxious world leaders and fresh questions about whether, as he’d spent four years claiming, “America was back.”
He wanted the first. He got the latter.
Denied a victory lap on the world stage, Biden will instead use his time in Peru and Brazil this week for reflection and looking ahead. No longer viewed on the world stage as the American president who defeated Donald Trump — and his “America First” ideology — for good, Biden will find himself amid leaders who are already moving on.
Many of his counterparts have pivoted to cultivating — or in many cases recultivating — relationships with Trump, angling for meetings in Palm Beach while they are in the hemisphere.
The summits carry an inevitable awkwardness given the short time Biden has left in office and the sea change that awaits when he leaves. Leaders are talking among themselves about how to insulate their economies and respond to the threats Trump has already put forth, but Biden administration officials have been largely excluded from those conversations.
“It’s very clear that’s all they’re thinking about,” said a senior US official. Despite leaders gathering in Lima and Rio de Janeiro, “all anyone can think about is what’s happening in DC.”
Aside from the summits’ hosts, Biden will meet only one other leader one-on-one: President Xi Jinping of China. He will hold trilateral talks with the leaders of Japan and South Korea, the latter of whom said this week he was dusting off his golf clubs in preparation for a potential round with Trump.
Biden’s entourage will represent slimmed-down staffing from prior foreign trips, with a relatively light schedule and low stakes – and the desire of many to begin searching for new jobs.
Traditionally, the APEC and G20 summits that Biden attends this weekend are moments for American presidents to confer with potential trading partners and military allies to collectively confront a host of global issues. Trump, however, disliked these types of summits and quizzed aides beforehand at the necessity of attending.
Biden, who met with Trump for two hours Wednesday at the White House, isn’t likely to be able to offer a great deal of reassurance to allies who wonder what’s in store for the next four years. Nor is it clear whether foreign leaders will be all that interested in his perspective.
Despite his proud declarations during his first trip abroad in 2021 that “America is back” after the Trump years, it is now evident that a majority of American voters chose an alternative path in Trump, whose first presidency caused strained alliances and prompted questions about US leadership.
As Biden was preparing to depart following his meeting with Trump, his top national security aide said his message to the world wouldn’t change, despite Trump’s election.
“He is going to have the same message that he’s had for four years as president, which is that he believes that America’s allies are vital to America’s national security. They make us stronger. They multiply our capability. They take a burden off of our shoulders,” US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.
“He is going to be making the case to our allies and, frankly, to our adversaries that America is standing with its alliances, investing in its alliances,” he went on. “That will be his message. It’s a message of principle. It’s a message of practicality. And it’s been one of the causes of President Biden’s life.”
On the ground, leaders of both APEC and G20 countries are expected to promote initiatives that would allow developing countries to invest more favorably at home at lower borrowing rates to prevent being overleveraged to countries like China. And the US is expected to tout more robust development financing by the World Bank, from which Trump acolytes have threatened to withdraw.
“Some in the Trump administration may not care for that,” a senior administration official said of empowering more grants from the World Bank. “But it’s a very good way to make sure problems don’t wash up on our shores.”
But elsewhere, US officials aren’t trying to lock other nations into agreements or partnerships to try to front-run the new administration. Allies have expressed gratitude for Biden’s predictable leadership but are now bracing for the tsunami of Trump.
“We’re not putting in poison pills,” the senior official told CNN. “Other countries wouldn’t even want to agree to anything that would get the relationship off to a rocky start with the new crowd.”
What assurances Biden can offer that would hold after January 20 aren’t clear. Ultimately, Biden’s counterparts were never entirely confident in his insistence that America would not return to those days. Even when he told members of the G7 that America was back, their first question was: “For how long?”
In Europe, waves of populism led leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron to take a skeptical eye toward any of Biden’s assurances that Trump’s brand of politics was a thing of the past. He spent much of Biden’s presidency arguing for a more self-sufficient Europe that could provide for its own defense, a mission that’s only escalated since Trump’s election.
After Biden withdrew from the presidential race this summer, many of his counterparts sent warm messages thanking him for his leadership. But privately, many who had encountered Biden up close at summits and meetings over the previous year – and witnessed what they said were clear signs of age – wondered how he could have mounted a reelection bid in the first place.
Biden is not the first incumbent Democrat to travel to Peru following a Trump victory. Then-President Barack Obama traveled to the same summit in the same city following Trump’s shock victory in 2016 and found himself confronted by Pacific nation leaders eager for some guidance on where US foreign policy might be headed next.
Among those most interested was Xi, who asked Obama at the end of a long meeting about the incoming president-elect. Obama suggested he wait and see how Trump operated once in office.
“We prefer to have a good relationship with the United States,” Xi responded, according to an account in a book by Ben Rhodes, a top Obama aide. “That is good for the world. But every action will have a reaction. And if an immature leader throws the world into chaos, then the world will know whom to blame.”
Xi will meet Biden on Saturday in Lima for what officials describe as a “bookend conversation” closing out Biden’s time in office. But having dealt with Trump for four years already, it’s not clear how much advice Xi will need this time.
