President Biden’s trip to Peru and Brazil, which starts Thursday, was supposed to have been his final chance to tell fellow world leaders that he was right along — former President Donald J. Trump was a one-time aberration whose America First policies had been swept aside by voters.
Instead, the president will be forced to acknowledge that Mr. Trump, now president-elect, is back. Mr. Biden’s belief in global institutions and partnerships will soon be replaced once again by Mr. Trump’s disdain for allies, embrace of isolationism and fondness for authoritarian regimes.
The week’s two summits in Lima and Rio will not be the reaffirmation that Mr. Biden had wanted of a foreign policy legacy built during a career in Congress and the White House. Rather, the gatherings will be a kind of elegy for a bygone era that defined American foreign policy for most of the president’s life.
“He’s not in a position to reassure people about U.S. foreign policy after Jan. 20 so it’s not his to predict or his to guarantee,” said Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Haass said the trip represents “a bridge between two very different conceptions of America’s role in the world.”
Ricardo Zúñiga, a former deputy assistant secretary at the State Department and former U.S. Consul General in San Paulo, Brazil, was blunt about what foreign leaders would think about Mr. Biden and the fate of his agenda when they see him at the summits.
“A lame duck is a lame duck,” Mr. Zúñiga said. “And they know it.”
Aides to the president say he is determined to keep pursuing that agenda until his last moment in office. In Peru, they said he would focus attention on his administration’s efforts in the Asia-Pacific region, especially when it comes to confronting Chinese aggression. Later, he will focus on the need to combat climate change, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Amazon rainforest. And in Rio, Mr. Biden will have his last global opportunity to make the case for Ukraine and to champion the alliances he has advocated during his term.
Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said the president would tell worried world leaders that he is confident in the durability of the partnerships between their countries and the United States.
“He believes that America’s allies are vital to America’s national security. They make us stronger. They multiply our capability,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters on Wednesday. “That’s what he’s going to hand off to President Trump.”
One of the most significant moments on Mr. Biden’s weeklong overseas trip is likely to be a face-to-face meeting with President Xi Jinping of China. It will be the second meeting between the two leaders in a year and it comes amid an easing of tensions that had spiked earlier in Mr. Biden’s term in office.
Mr. Sullivan said that Mr. Biden intended to discuss with Mr. Xi the discovery that Chinese hackers had broken into the American telecommunication system and obtained information from the phones of officials and others in the United States.
“We have made clear over time that we will respond when we see actions taken in terms of cyberattacks, cyberespionage, cyberintrusions,” he said. “It will remain a feature of our policy going forward.”
Aides said that Mr. Biden would continue his policy of seeking to prevent legitimate, if tense, competition with China from veering into conflict or confrontation. In a meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Biden urged his soon-to-be-successor to keep open lines of communication between officials at various levels of the government.
But the meeting with Mr. Xi, which will take place on Saturday, comes as Mr. Trump prepares to take office again, promising a much more aggressive approach to China that includes vast tariffs on Chinese goods headed for the American marketplace.
Mr. Biden intends to make it clear to Mr. Xi that it is important to maintain what Mr. Sullivan called “stability, clarity, predictability” during the transition to Mr. Trump’s government. Mr. Sullivan called the American political transitions every four years “uniquely consequential moments in geopolitics” that can sometimes prompt foreign adversaries to try and take advantage of the moment of change.
Still, like the other issues on Mr. Biden’s agenda during the overseas trip, the meeting with Mr. Xi may simply underscore that the timer on the president’s foreign policy approach is quickly ticking down to zero.
In Peru, Mr. Biden is expected to discuss the issue of migration, which became a flashpoint at the southern U.S. border throughout his term in office. His long-term proposals for working with countries throughout the Southern Hemisphere are likely to be quickly reversed by Mr. Trump, whose view of the issue is very different.
The same may be true when Mr. Biden stops in the Amazon rainforest for a three-hour stop meant to highlight his commitment to the environment and the battle against climate change. Aides did not reveal any specific announcements that the president may make while he is there.
But even if Mr. Biden did make new environmental promises, Mr. Trump has vowed to go in the opposite direction when he takes office. He has vowed to “drill, drill, drill” for oil and gas, while saying he will once again pull the United States out of the Paris climate accords, a global effort to limit carbon emissions and prevent global warming.
In an interview with CNN this week, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil was direct about his climate concerns, saying that Mr. Trump “needs to think like an inhabitant of this planet” when shaping his climate policy.
Mr. Zúñiga said Mr. Biden had no choice “but to stick to the plan,” adding that the American president and his team understand that Mr. Biden will get questions from his counterparts about what parts of U.S. policy are about to change.
“There will be questions about the commitment to the United States in the international community and he’s just going to have to be honest about what he sees,” Mr. Zúñiga said.
Those questions will also be posed in Rio, where Mr. Biden will raise the issue of Ukraine’s need for military aid in its fight against Russia’s invasion. Mr. Trump and many of his Republican allies on Capitol Hill have made it clear that they have no more patience for the billions of dollars in financial support that has been sent to Ukraine in the last two years.
Mr. Biden is likely to try and reassure the other leaders that the United States will find a way to continue to help Ukraine, even with Mr. Trump at the helm next year.
But while Mr. Biden may try to offer reassurance on issues like Ukraine, climate change, economic competition with China and migration, the reality is that after the election “the entire subject of conversation is going to change, no doubt about it,” said Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, the founding director of the North American Integration and Development Center.
“In many ways,” he added, “this whole trip is the Biden swan song.”
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