HIROSHIMA, Japan — President Joe Biden is headed to a summit meeting in Japan meant to unify allies against threats from Russia and China, leaving behind an unresolved fight over the debt ceiling that showcases the disunity surrounding American politics.
Biden was forced to cancel stops in Papua New Guinea and Australia as negotiations with Republican leaders drag on and the U.S. approaches an early June deadline by which Congress must raise the debt limit to avert default.
Shortening the trip is a setback for the president’s diplomatic ambitions. The White House had envisioned the meetings with leaders in Australia and Papua New Guinea as a forum to rally countries that have chafed under China’s efforts to exert military and economic influence in the Pacific. A central premise of Biden’s presidency is that the U.S. offers the better model — that democracies allow political freedoms and economic opportunities that autocracies like China forbid. The prospect of an unprecedented default that could plunge the U.S. into recession undercuts the idea that things are running seamlessly at home.
Even coming to the brink of default “would cause enormous anger and backlash toward the U.S. because all of this is totally avoidable,” said Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. A full-fledged default, he added, would "shake trust in the U.S. leadership in the international financial system and, over time, erode confidence in the dollar.”
At the White House, aides tried to put the best face on the hasty overhaul of the president’s itinerary. John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, told reporters that curtailing the trip underscores Biden’s determination to end the impasse and not hand adversaries a fresh talking point about America’s partisan split.
Default, he said, “can affect our own international reputation, because there’s countries like Russia and China that would love nothing more than for us to default so they could point the finger and say, ‘You see, the United States is not a stable, reliable partner.’"
Australian Prime Minster Anthony Albanese will attend the Group of Seven summit meeting in Hiroshima and will have a chance to speak to Biden on the sidelines. Still, in something of a consolation prize for his absence in Sydney, Biden invited Albanese to an official state visit in Washington down the road.
The G-7 summit of leading industrial nations, which runs Friday through Sunday, is expected to focus on blunting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and curbing China’s sway in the Pacific. Participants include leaders from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, along with the European Union.
Russian President Vladimir Putin rattled other nations by moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus amid the grinding conflict. By hosting the summit in Hiroshima — a city leveled by an American atom bomb in World War II — Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida wanted to remind world leaders of the devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, analysts said. On Friday, Biden will join Kishida and the other G-7 leaders at the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum, whose message is “No More Hiroshimas.” They will lay a wreath at the site and plant a tree.
As the summit unfolds, one of Biden’s goals is reassuring counterparts who are anxious that U.S. foreign policy is seesawing between global engagement and isolation. Biden is up for re-election next year and victory is no sure thing. Former President Donald Trump, who mulled pulling out of the NATO alliance, is running again and leading in Republican presidential primary polls. A Trump victory in 2024 could mark a return to more inward-looking policies that prompted worries among allies that America’s friendship is more fragile than they had imagined.
“Trump’s re-ascendance has cast fresh doubts across the Pacific as to whether or not America will remain a leader and a protector of countries in the region,” said Brett Bruen, who was director of global engagement in President Barack Obama’s White House. “So, Biden has to reassure our allies that U.S. policy is not going to radically change and U.S. support is not going to be radically reduced in the next couple of years.”
Another of Biden’s goals is adopting measures that will help Ukraine repel Russian forces, foreign policy analysts said. That might be tough to pull off. G-7 nations, for example, are divided on the merits of imposing additional sanctions against Russia. An analysis by the Atlantic Council showed that the members collectively export about $4.7 billion a month to Russia. That’s nearly half of what they sent before the invasion. Still, the U.S. would like to reduce this amount even further, and some G-7 members may be reluctant. Both the European Union countries and Japan export far more goods to Russia than the U.S. and scaling back could damage their own economies, the report shows.
“Can the U.S. convince the Europeans to shut off about two-thirds of what’s left out there in terms of exports” to Russia? Lipsky said. “I just see this as a major sticking point.”
Russia’s invasion looms over the summit because of what it may portend. Asian nations living in China’s daunting shadow took note of how Russia attacked a smaller neighbor without provocation. Kishida last year said that “Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow.”
China’s military exercises have menaced the self-governing island of Taiwan, which Beijing sees as part of its domain. Should China attack Taiwan, the conflict would inevitably imperil Japan, which has already seen Chinese encroachment into its waters, experts warn.
Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Asia-Pacific Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote last week that Kishida has “noted that Russia’s use of military force to change the European status quo could just as easily be imagined in the Indo-Pacific, where Chinese military forces seem increasingly threatening to its neighbors.”
Restraining China is tricky, given its extensive trade relations with the West and the infrastructure projects it has used to forge ties to poorer nations. The U.S. and its allies see a “coercive” thrust to China’s economic policies. At the summit, they are expected to discuss a joint approach to confronting China’s economic leverage.
Colleen Cottle, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, described “a really harsh environment that foreign companies are facing in China. And so, how these G-7 countries can think about how to collectively coordinate policies to address that I think will be very key.”
Early in his presidency, Biden promised allies that “the United States is there.” Biden won’t be there for the back half of the trip he'd planned. The White House's hope is that other nations will forgive and accept the reason: that it's worth heading home early if it means preventing a default that would reverberate worldwide.
