WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden is opening a busy stretch Friday tending to international allies anxious about where U.S. foreign policy is headed when he leaves office in four months, most likely leaving behind a difficult set of crises for former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris to contend with.
But even as Biden launches into a week of talks with world leaders that will take place in Delaware, the White House and at the United Nations, global attention has begun drifting toward Trump and Harris, who are offering voters — and the world— sharply diverging views on foreign policy.
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“The more I talk to people around the world, the more I get a sense of profound anxiety about the shape of the U.S. election,” said Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Alterman added that Biden’s upcoming engagements with world leaders could seem like “a sideshow” as much of the world focuses on Harris and Trump.
Biden kicked off his spurt of diplomacy on Friday by hosting Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for talks at his home near Wilmington, Delaware. The White House said the two leaders' discussion touched on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, China’s military assertiveness in the South China Sea and tensions with Taiwan, as well as other issues.
The president will hold one-on-one talks at his house on Saturday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. They're all visiting the president's hometown for a meeting of the Indo-Pacific group known as the Quad.
The four leaders will get together for a joint meeting Saturday, and Biden will hold a dinner for them at the high school he attend more than 60 years ago. The president stopped by the school, Archmere Academy, on Friday evening and greeted the football team.
One student asked Biden what it was like being president. Biden replied, “It’s a lot like being class president, only joking.”
Biden will then welcome United Arab Emirates' President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to the White House on Monday for talks before setting off for three days at the U.N. General Assembly, where the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are expected to dominate the agenda and be at the heart of Biden's Tuesday address to the assembly.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will come to Washington on Thursday for talks with Biden. And more leader meetings on the sidelines of the U.N. are expected to be added to the president's schedule.
All the while, world leaders are beginning to seek audiences with Harris and Trump as they try to get a better understanding of what comes next.
Trump said this week that he plans to meet with Modi during the Indian leader's U.S. visit for the U.N. gathering and Quad summit.
The former president, speaking at a campaign rally, called Modi “fantastic” even as he grumbled that India had become a “very big abuser” in its trade relationship with the United States.
Trump said he will also “probably” meet with Zelenskyy next week. The two last spoke by phone in July and last met in person on the sidelines of the 2019 U.N. General Assembly.
That face-to-face meeting happened about two months after a phone call in which Trump called on Zelenskyy to investigate Biden’s actions in Ukraine when he was vice president during the Obama administration. It was the call that led to Trump's first impeachment.
The Ukrainians have informed the White House that they are arranging a meeting with Trump, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether it was informed by the Indian government or Trump about the planned Modi visit with the GOP nominee.
Zelenskyy will also meet with Harris on Thursday, separately from Biden's sitdown, the White House said. Harris last met Zelenskyy on the sidelines of an international gathering in Switzerland in June.
The White House said that Harris would also hold her own meeting on Monday with UAE president.
Biden in his final months in office is trying to manage a set of foreign policy crises that could still worsen and complicate his legacy.
White House-led efforts to win a cease-fire and hostage deal in the nearly year-old Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza have stalled. The conflict is now in danger of spiraling into a full-blown regional war as tensions rise on the Israel-Lebanon border.
Those tensions heightened after Israel on Friday carried out targeted air strikes near Beirut.
The action followed two waves of deadly attacks earlier this week in which hundreds of hand-held pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah militants exploded. The sophisticated sabotage operations are widely believed to have been carried out by Israel. The operations killed dozens and wounded hundreds.
The air strikes and audacious electronic device attacks are raising questions about whether Biden's influence with Israel is waning, a notion that the White House disputes.
A day before Tuesday's first wave of attacks, senior White House official Amos Hochstein visited Israel and warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials against taking action that could intensify the conflict.
Asked if getting a hostage deal may be slipping out of reach in the final months of his presidency, Biden told reporters Friday he still had hope and that his national security team continues to work to get a deal completed.
“If I ever said it wasn’t realistic, we might as well leave,” Biden said. “A lot of things don’t look realistic until we get them done. We have to keep at it.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine is pressing Biden to allow the use of Western provided long-range weapons to strike deeper into Russia. It's a move that President Vladimir Putin has warned would mean that the U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia.
Harris, if elected, is expected to take a similar approach to foreign policy as Biden.
Since jumping into the presidential race, Harris has pitched herself as a critical member of Biden's foreign policy team, deeply engaged with the administration's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Hamas' invasion of Israel and helping the president bolster ties in the Pacific.
At the same time, Harris has called out Trump for being too cozy with authoritarian leaders during his four years in the White House.
During this month's presidential debate, Harris told Trump that Putin “would eat you for lunch" and noted Trump had exchanged “love letters” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and generally “admires dictators.”
“It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again, because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors,” Harris previously told Trump.
For his part, Trump has claimed that Harris is not capable as a negotiator, “hates Israel," and shares responsibility for the Biden administration's “embarrassing” troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Biden's plans for the weekend's summit show he is trying to bring a personal touch to the gathering, welcoming leaders for talks at his private residence and hosting Saturday night's dinner at his high school alma mater.
The White House said the leaders would also roll out an announcement related to Biden's Cancer Moonshot Initiative, a long-running passion project of the president and his wife aimed at reducing cancer deaths. The Bidens' son Beau died in 2015 at the age 46 of brain cancer.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the summit was designed to have a more intimate feel.
“He wanted to have a private moment with them, to continue to grow those relationships,” Jean-Pierre said. “That’s what this is about.”
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Madhani reported from Washington.