President Joe Biden canceled his trips to Papua New Guinea and Australia next week to continue debt ceiling talks with congressional leaders that he held Tuesday at the White House.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement that the president would to return to Washington on Sunday, following the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan, “in order to be back for meetings with congressional leaders to ensure that Congress takes action by the deadline to avert default.”
When asked what kind of message the change in the president’s plan would convey to allies and partners he was scheduled to meet, National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters during a briefing earlier Tuesday that leaders would “understand that the president also has to focus on making sure that we don’t default.”
Biden will depart for Hiroshima on Wednesday. From Japan, Biden was scheduled to continue to Sydney for the Quad Summit with a brief stop in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, to meet with Pacific Island Forum leaders. The meetings had been billed as opportunities to deepen cooperation on regional challenges and advance U.S. strategic interests in countering China’s influence.
It would not be the first time an American president skipped a summit over budget disputes at home. Barack Obama canceled a trip to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Indonesia and the East Asia summit in Brunei in 2013 because of a government shutdown over a budget disagreement, and Bill Clinton pulled out of the APEC Japan meeting in 1995, also during a debt ceiling dispute.
‘A mini-G-20’
Hiroshima is the venue for this year’s May 19-21 summit of the G-7, a grouping of the world’s leading industrial nations, including the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Leaders will try to find alignment in countering Beijing’s use of trade and investment restrictions, boycotts and sanctions — practices the West views as Chinese “economic coercion.” They will do so through export controls and restrictions on investment from their own nations to China, while seeking to slow China’s technological advance and reduce its dominance of the global supply chain.
More than a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the meeting will also focus on supporting Kyiv’s defense and ratcheting up economic pressure on Russia through broader export bans. G-7 members, mainly those in Europe, still export around $4.7 billion a month to Russia, about 43% of what they did before the invasion — mostly pharmaceuticals, machinery, food and chemicals.
As part of his outreach to the Global South, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, this year’s G-7 host, has invited Australia, Brazil, Comoros, Cook Islands, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Ukraine and Vietnam.
“A little bit like the G-7 trying to create a mini-G-20 without China and Russia,” said Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, in a briefing to reporters Friday.
Looming over the meeting is the concern that financial instability from the threat of a U.S. default and the recent collapse of three American banks will spill over into the rest of the world. That would particularly hurt countries in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia that are struggling with post-pandemic debt accumulated through infrastructure and other loans mainly from China.
There have been calls to reduce those debts to more manageable levels, said Shihoko Goto, deputy director of the Asia program at the Wilson Center. However, she told VOA, “Without having China there, there isn’t really going to be much momentum.”
Symbolism of setting
Nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation are also at the top of this year’s agenda, with Kishida’s symbolic choice of hosting the summit in his hometown of Hiroshima, a city destroyed by an atomic weapon in 1945.
Notably lacking in this G-7 is the push to provide funding for global infrastructure projects as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which was a focus in the last two G-7 summits.
Biden’s trip to Papua New Guinea would have been the first for a U.S. president, following Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to the 2018 Asia Pacific Economic Forum in Port Moresby.
“There is no question but that this is a disappointment to the leaders of the Pacific Islands and the Quad, particularly Australia and PNG,” said Daniel Russel, vice president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “It will be seen in the region as a self-inflicted wound caused by political polarization in Washington that does not reflect well on America’s reliability as a partner.”
He was scheduled to meet with Prime Minister James Marape and other leaders of the Pacific Island Forum, a grouping of 18 countries and territories spanning more than 30 million square kilometers of ocean. The meeting was intended to establish stronger strategic ties and deter those nations from making security deals with China amid rising tensions over Taiwan.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has visited the region three times, setting up infrastructure projects and signing a 2022 security pact with the Solomon Islands.
“The U.S. needs to make up ground in the region,” said Charles Edel, the inaugural Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, during a briefing earlier this week. “Years of strategic neglect from Washington produced a strategic vacuum that China was eager to step into.”
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