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Biden in the background at G20 Summit as leaders brace for second go-round with Trump

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Biden in the background at G20 Summit as leaders brace for second go-round with Trump

Foreign governments are seeking to build a rapport with the incoming administration before Trump follows through on campaign pledges that have the potential to strain military and economic alliances.

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RIO DE JANEIRO – The first time Donald Trump won the presidency, he took the diplomatic world by surprise by making and taking unsupervised calls from foreign leaders immediately after his election − a violation of established norms in U.S. diplomacy. The outgoing Obama administration was, to put it mildly, annoyed.

This time the White House is shrugging it off – even as as leaders shift their attention from President Joe Biden, who is making his final appearance at the Group of 20 Summit, to the incoming president, who cannot officially set U.S. foreign policy for two more months.

Trump’s return to White House has foreign governments jockeying for position as they size up his national security team, build up a rapport with the incoming administration and try to get on the Republican’s good side before he follows through on campaign pledges that could strain America’s military and economic alliances.

“Most of the action right now from our trading partners and allies is in trying to make inroads with the incoming president-elect, Trump, and whoever might be his future team,” said Kelly Ann Shaw, who was deputy director of the National Economic Council in his first administration.

Trump vowed to put the squeeze on China and Europe through tariffs and other means during his campaign and has signaled his intent to leave the Paris climate deal again.

He has said he wants Europe to repay America for its contribution to Ukraine’s military equipment, although it’s unclear how, and has vowed to end Russia’s war with the country in one day, possibly before he takes office.

“Perhaps all the talk on the campaign might just be the opening bid in an effort to adjust trade practices that favor America a little bit more,” said Andrew Payne, a lecturer at City St George’s, University of London. “But there are these spillover effects. And if you have enough of these over time, it can start to shake the fabric of the order itself as well.”

In Washington, diplomatic staff have been furiously researching Trump’s national security picks as they roll in, trying to read the tea leaves on what the various appointments could mean for his approach to relations with their respective countries and institutions such as the United Nations and NATO in which the U.S. has traditionally played a leading role.

“We are pragmatic and realistic. We know that the U.S. is a very important actor, but we think we have to shape our own destiny without being overly dependent on the U.S.,” one European diplomat said.

Trump’s assertion earlier in the year that he once told a NATO ally that Russia could “do whatever the hell they want” with countries that don’t spend enough on defense had America’s partners reeling ahead of the Washington summit last summer. They moved to to take the coordination of security assistance for Ukraine out of the United States’ hands and put it under NATO control.

When Biden faltered during a debate with Trump days before the NATO Summit, rattled allies began to realize they needed to accelerate plans to reduce their reliance on the U.S.

In Eastern Europe, “preparations at the regional level for a different kind of military and geopolitical alliance are already underway,” said Cornell University public policy professor Rachel Beatty Reidl, director of the school’s Center on Global Democracy.

“They have no illusions about what the change in presidency might mean for Russia’s strategic approaches and their own defense of democracy and territorial integrity,” Reidl said.

In a briefing just after the election, Olena Prokopenko, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who had advised the minister of finance of Ukraine, told reporters: “I see the acknowledgement in Europe that Donald Trump and his return will leave Europe with no choice but to take responsibility for its own defense, to invest more in defense and to limit its reliance on the United States.”

Leaders rush to meet with Trump

Four years ago, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe became the first head of government to meet Trump. The early contact was viewed as having paid off. Japan was among the nations Trump visited during his first year in office.

This time it was Argentina’s hard-right libertarian leader, Javier Milei, who scored the first in-person meeting with the incoming president. The pair met Thursday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where Milei was attending a conservative gathering.

Argentina is a member of the G20, and Milei will be part of the cohort that Biden meets this week in Brazil.

The president-elect has been fielding congratulatory calls at his Florida resort, more than 80 of which have taken place with foreign dignitaries, since his election victory this month, according to a source familiar with Trump’s schedule.

The transition period in the U.S. is longer than in most other countries, which makes for some awkward maneuvering as new and old leaders juggle their need to continue working with Biden while they try to avoid the appearance of favoritism and sidestep a possible clash with Trump.

It is Biden who will be at the G20 Summit and retains the power of the presidency until Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20. But the prospect for substantive deliverables looked grim. The U.S. couldn’t say before a meeting with China’s Xi Jinping in Peru, at another gathering of leaders, what it expected beyond warning Beijing against actions the U.S. views as harmful and keeping the lines of communication between the two nations open.

“Nobody is going to want to look like they’re trying to get things done under Biden, because Trump is going to be there in two months,” said Justin Logan, of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “And he’s not going to look happily on people who he will have viewed as scheming before he took office to make deals with Joe Biden.”

The Biden administration says it is unbothered by Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders.

“Every president-elect receives calls from world leaders, takes calls from world leaders, has calls from world leaders,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday. “It is not unusual.”

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto met separately with Biden in the past week. They have also sought meetings with Trump since the election. Both leaders are new, having taken office this fall.

“There are a number of fresh faces representing some of the world’s biggest economies,” Shaw said.

Milei is part of a crop of G20 leaders who have taken office since Trump’s first term. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was elected in 2022. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer came to power over the summer.

A divide and conquer approach is expected from Trump

Although the European Union has traditionally moved as one, there is some concern that if nations with right-wing governments agree to Trump’s terms, it will lead to a fragmentation of the bloc. Before the NATO summit had even wrapped up last summer, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán flew to Florida. And that was before Americans had again elected Trump.

French President Emmanuel Macron has cautioned that Trump will use trade policy to drive a wedge between China and Europe and try to force nations to pick sides. Since the U.S. election, he has vocally encouraged Europe to fight for its interests, in the same way that Trump has vowed to put America first.

Payne, the lecturer at City in London, said, “Trump’s approach is going to be almost a divide and conquer.”

“We will definitely be seeing a shift away from multilateral approaches to security, to economics, whatever it might be, towards this much more the ‘America first’ approach of using protectionist measures or using threats to try and bully even traditional allies into changing their behavior in ways that perhaps benefit the U.S.,” he said.

Even if leaders feel they are prepared, he predicted there will be a “degree of shock in Europe when that actually starts to happen.” And unlike the first time he was in office, Payne said, “Trump actually might follow through on some of these threats.”

Even the sitting U.S. president has tried to persuade Trump to preserve his foreign policy objectives. Biden hosted Trump at the White House on Wednesday for a two-hour meeting, where they discussed Ukraine, the war in Gaza and fighting between Israel and Iranian-backed proxies in Lebanon.

“President Biden reinforced his view that the United States standing with Ukraine on an ongoing basis is in our national security interest,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters. “A stable Europe, standing up to aggressors and dictators and pushing back against their aggression is vital to ensuring that we don’t end up getting dragged directly into a war, which has happened, obviously, twice in the 20th century on the European continent.”

Trumpism is back, but for how long?

In his retelling of a gathering of Group of Seven leaders several months after he took office, Biden says that he told Macron “America’s back,” and that the French president responded, “For how long?”

In years since, Biden says leaders have pulled him aside time and time again at international summits to tell him he could not allow Trump to win another term.

Biden, in his conversations at the G20, will reinforce his message that the U.S. is a stable partner as he tries to keep the work he did to build up regional alliances with nations such as Japan and South Korea, and Australia and the U.K, through a grouping known as AUKUS, from being undone.

“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. And then asking its allies to step up and do their part, which they have done these past four years, is central to American strength and capacity in the world,” Sullivan said.

Biden may now find himself rebuffed.

“The results of the election, I think, were a complete repudiation of the Biden administration’s policies,” Shaw said. “And the incoming president-elect, Trump administration, feels very strongly that he has a mandate to take the U.S. economy in a different direction.”

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