Biden flexes his political muscle abroad while Trump’s shadow reemerges at home

BALI, Indonesia — President Joe Biden this week took the measure of the man atop the globe’s other superpower and rallied allies against Russia’s escalating war, all while being bolstered by unexpected political success back home.

In one of the most eventful stretches of his presidency, Biden concluded a trip in Asia with renewed political strength, having reinforced the leading role of the United States on the world stage at time of war.

But even amid the glow of what advisers saw as a successful trip came reminders of how tenuous that success can be. As a homeward-bound Air Force One lifted off Wednesday into the warm Indonesian sky, the president was presented with a fresh set of concerns.

A missile explosion in Poland forced an emergency meeting of world leaders and risked deepening the war in Ukraine. And while Biden’s summit with China’s Xi Jinping provided a temporary thaw in a nascent cold war, it did little to relieve the tension around matters like Taiwan.

At home, a similar dichotomy was forming. A massively successful midterm election was set to be colored by a coming Republican majority in the House. That GOP majority, while underwhelming in its margin, will complicate Biden’s next two years in office. And Donald Trump, the man Biden believes poses a threat to the nation’s very democracy, announced his candidacy for president again.

Nevertheless, Biden will land in Washington better suited to face those challenges, buoyed by his trip abroad and a sense that the midterm elections provided his administration with needed political stability..

“America is working alongside our allies and partners to deliver real, meaningful progress around the world,” he said at a Bali press conference. “And at this critical moment, no nation is better positioned to help build the future we want than the United States of America.”

The trip to Asia arguably stood as the most important diplomatic foray of Biden’s presidency because of the twin threats posed by Moscow and Beijing.

Up until a week before Biden landed in Bali, U.S. officials believed Russian President Vladimir Putin would also be attending the G-20. But he backed out in the wake of yet another humiliating defeat for the Russian military in Ukraine.

Still, Putin loomed over the proceedings, especially in the G-20’s final hours on Wednesday following an explosion in Poland. The exact circumstances of the blast — which killed at least two civilians — were not clear, although preliminary findings suggested it was caused by a wayward Ukrainian defense missile. But in the early hours after it took place, it risked escalating the conflict since Poland, as a member of NATO, has a mutual defense pact that could lead to further repercussions against Russia. Biden hastily convened a meeting of some NATO and other world leaders at his Bali hotel, sitting center as they planned a response.

Biden railed against the “brutality and inhumanity” that Russia has demonstrated by targeting Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure, declaring it “totally unconscionable.”

Elsewhere at the summit, there was disagreement over how to approach Moscow’s war machine. Unlike the G-7, a group of wealthy democracies that marched in lockstep with Biden at their summer conference, the G-20 is more of a mix of leaders, including some of Putin’s fellow authoritarians like Saudi Arabia and China.

Biden pushed the nations to further isolate Putin, but he did so as global inflation and slowing economies put new pressures on countries.

Biden’s first stop on the trip was a climate change conference last week in Egypt, where he reassured nervous allies about American leadership on that front. The president then traveled to Cambodia, buoyed by news that Democrats had kept control of the Senate, giving him geopolitical momentum as his focus shifted to China.

Biden offered a full-throated American commitment to the nations of Southeast Asia, pledging at a Phnom Penh summit to help stand against China’s growing dominance in the region — without mentioning that nation by name. The U.S. has long derided China’s violation of the international rules-based order — from trade to shipping to intellectual property — and Biden tried to emphasize his administration’s solidarity with a region America has often overlooked.

The Biden White House has aimed to prioritize the area, and the president huddled with the leaders of South Korea and Japan to seek input on how to approach his summit with Xi on the sideline of the G-20 in Indonesia.

That in-person meeting, the trip’s main event, was nearly two years in the making and Beijing and Washington went through tortuous negotiations to make it happen. Biden said there was “little substitute to face-to-face” contact with Xi as the two men shook hands Monday against a backdrop of flags. Later, as they sat across from each other at the start of their three-hour meeting, both men struck a note of needing to find common ground, of the necessity to show the world they were capable of improving relations.

Biden said the two men had “blunt” disagreements but pledged to continue talking.

Few concrete accomplishments were achieved but just meeting at all was seen as an important step toward deescalation.

“The world has come to a crossroads [and] we need to chart the right course,” said Xi, according to an English translation. “The world expects that China and the United States will properly handle the relationship.”

Both nations acknowledged they face challenges posed by global conflict and economic headwinds. They pledged to restart climate talks and agreed their senior advisers should resume communication after months of silence. And both sides vowed that there was no place for nuclear conflict in the world, including Ukraine.

But while Biden and Xi banked on their personal history to help diffuse the chance of outright conflict, their sharp disagreements were in plain sight, differing on trade, technology restrictions, human rights and, most notably, Taiwan.

Biden declared afterward he did not believe China would make a move on the island nation “imminently.” But Beijing’s statement after the meeting suggested that Washington should mind its own business, declaring “anyone that seeks to split Taiwan from China will be violating the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation.”

Biden announced climate change and infrastructure investments at the G-20, but economic worries await the president when he returns to Washington. Inflation may have cooled slightly but remains high, and many economic forecasts predict a recession early next year. But Biden has steadfastly denied that it’s inevitable and believes voters have rewarded him by keeping Democrats in charge of the Senate.

That will allow him to continue to get his judiciary and Cabinet appointments confirmed and create a bulwark to some of the extreme GOP opposition. Still, the House Republicans will likely stymie much of Biden’s agenda and could imperil aid to Ukraine — something the president tried to downplay in Indonesia. And while many in Biden’s orbit think that congressional Republicans could serve as a useful political foil, a grim resignation has also begun to set in as to how the investigations, frivolous or not, would dominate the day-to-day workings of the White House.

And then there’s Trump, whose shadow also looms.

In a remarkable split screen, Trump declared his candidacy for president at his gilded Mar-a-Lago club at the exact moment Biden, on the other side of the planet, spoke to reporters in Bali about the explosion in Poland.

Standing a world away from Trump, Biden was eventually asked if he had a reaction to his predecessor's candidacy.

“Not really.”