The Final Campaign: Obama’s Globalist World Tour
The president is planning to travel the globe to seal his foreign policy legacy.
(Politico) – President Barack Obama will be making good use of Air Force One while he still can.
Obama has asked aides to set a busy international travel schedule for him in his final year, with “half a dozen” trips already in the works and more potentially coming together. The travel will be aimed at cementing a foreign policy legacy he hopes will include the Trans-Pacific Partnership, increased attention to Asia, an opening of Latin America, progress against the Islamic State and significant global movement on climate change.
He’ll be fighting the same battle to keep the world from looking past him as he will be at home. But White House aides insist that what they’ve got ahead in 2016 is more than just a standard eighth-year world tour to try to assert themselves and stay clear of the presidential campaign.
The only continents the White House is ruling out as presidential destinations are Australia and Antarctica. And while another multi-stop trip to Africa is also off the table (after a visit to Kenya and Ethiopia in 2015), aides familiar with the matter say, a single stop there tacked onto another trip, perhaps one to Europe, is still possible.
They’re also looking at a stop in the Middle East, though that would also likely be tacked onto a larger trip elsewhere rather than a full swing through the region, which has gotten only more complicated for Obama throughout his presidency.
How little time Obama has left is part of nearly every conversation.
“You’ll see the president spending a lot of time driving to the finish line, obviously with the counter-ISIL campaign, but also with respect to affirmative elements of his presidency,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said in an interview.
Four trips already have their main stops set: Obama will be in Japan for a G-7 meeting in June, in Poland for the NATO summit in July, in China for the G-20 meeting in September, and likely in Peru for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November, after the presidential election.
Obama said during a July meeting in the Oval Office with Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong that he’s looking forward to visiting the Southeast Asian nation, and aides say they expect him to make good on that, probably as part of one of the Asia trips.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff also gave Obama a “standing invitation” to come to Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics in August, and though several White House aides say they’re hoping to go, that trip hasn’t yet been scheduled.
And then there’s the possibility of a trip to Cuba, widely expected but so far still tentative. Obama has said openly that he wants to go, and the White House is working behind the scenes to make it happen.
Aides say Cuba wouldn’t be a one-off destination,but more likely combined with a longer trip to several Central and South American countries. Among the possibilities: Argentina, whose new president, Mauricio Macri, has impressed the White House with his interest in building relations, and one of the bigger economic and political powers that Obama hasn’t yet visited as president. The working peace deal that Colombia signed in September with the FARC revolutionary forces — mediated with the help of Cuban President Raúl Castro — has also caught the White House’s eye, and an encouraging trip there to demonstrate the support of the U.S. is exactly the kind of stop that would fit in with the public diplomacy sensibility.
“What matters more than where he goes is what he does,” said Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass. He said the South American trips make sense and that he’d like to see Obama visit Europe in the year ahead to talk with allies about ISIL and the mutating set of issues posed by the assertiveness of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But there’s only so much Obama can realistically expect to get world leaders to commit to as his time in office ticks down.
“Travel early on in a presidency has the value of investing in the relationship, when the president could be around for another three or seven years,” Haass said. “Traveling at the end of the presidency is very different. They’re no longer looking toward the future.”
Rhodes insisted the opposite, that the last year of a presidency is the time when things actually get done, and pointed to the diplomatic opening to Cuba, and the international agreements on climate change and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“There is truth to the notion that there is a combination of international experience and freedom of maneuver that presidents have late in their terms that this presidency has clearly been taking advantage of over the course of the last year,” Rhodes said.
Plus, Rhodes said, it’s not as though Obama will be going away: The president will be 55 when he leaves office, and Rhodes said that the expectation around the world that he’ll continue to be a player in international affairs for decades should give him a little extra sway in his lame-duck year.
But for all the hopes White House aides express about starting new business, they’re going into their final year with huge pieces of what they hope will be Obama’s legacy up in the air.
The Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate agreement, both major successes for the administration on paper, probably won’t matter much unless Obama works hard to make them more concrete before the next president’s sworn in.
“On those two issues — and Cuba as well — the administration will have to use its remaining time to protect the accomplishments from fizzling out or worse,” said Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and chairman of the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. “That’ll take a lot of steady, blocking-and-tackling follow-up diplomacy — including public diplomacy — to maintain such support as the deals have.”
Then there’s Syria, which Talbott calls “the ultimate problem from hell.”
The White House and Hillary Clinton both celebrated the passage of the United Nations Security Council resolution on Syria as major progress. But, Talbott argued, it “was possible only because the parties, especially the U.S. and Russia, agreed to disagree on major factors, kicking the hard decisions down the road.”
Those decisions, Talbott said, include not just the particulars of what Putin now does, but how to get Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-majority states to step up their own efforts to quell Syria’s civil war and defeat ISIL.
“There are no signs of those developments, which means that between now and the end of the administration, Syria may not only fester to ISIS’s advantage,” Talbott said. “It could get worse.”
Then there are what Talbott said should be other key issues for Obama in Europe in his last year: supporting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, emphasizing the U.S. relationship with the United Kingdom while urging it to remain part of the European Union and, with the EU generally, maintaining pressure on Putin over Ukraine.
Rhodes said there will also be the expected extra duties of a presidential election year: urging other world leaders not to read too much into the rhetoric of Donald Trump and other candidates that veers into what may sound xenophobic and isolationist or promises massive changes in American foreign policy. And, as always in a White House where knocking on wood is almost as common as checking email, aides worry about an unexpected issue flaring up and consuming the president’s attention.
Or even the possibility that a new breakthrough might emerge.
“There is not a year that the president has been in office that there have not been issues that have emerged, either crises or opportunities, that might have been foreseen,” Rhodes said.
One of Obama’s most significant international encounters, Rhodes predicted, will require him only to fly to Palm Springs, California, where he’ll hosta meeting of Asian leaders right after Valentine’s Day. A major item on the agenda: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Obama’s team will be pushing Congress to pass, aides hope, before the expected lame duck session at the end of next year.
For the fast-track trade vote that paved the way for TPP, Obama had to get heavily involved himself, doing the kind of lobbying over the phone and in person that he’s often steered clear of.
“Probably the issue that will have the greatest foreign policy consequence,” Haass said, “will require the president to be in Washington.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/obama-travel-world-217180
No comments:
Post a Comment