Biden takes his democracy campaign on the road

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Having just spent an election cycle warning that democracy was on the ballot, President Joe Biden now heads overseas to rally the fight for democracy abroad.

With those midterm results providing a surprising success, Biden journeys to Asia for a week of high-stakes diplomacy — culminating in arguably the most consequential summit of his presidency. At the G-20 in Indonesia, he will push Europe to hold firm with Ukraine against Russia and try to tackle the global challenges of inflation and climate change. He also will finally hold his first face-to-face meeting with the leader of the world’s other superpower, China's Xi Jinping.

The trips will provide an early test as to whether the domestic political capital he accrued this past week can translate overseas. Already, Biden has framed Tuesday’s results as a measure of validation from voters that he believes will reassure allies.

“The rest of the world looks to us. They are looking to see if we are a healthy democracy and that institutions matter,” Biden said in a valedictory press conference on Wednesday. “These world leaders know we’re doing better than anyone else in the world.”

Biden will make a pair of stops before Bali. First, he’ll make a brief appearance at a massive climate conference in Egypt, where he will underscore America’s commitment to battling rising temperatures and their devastating impact. From there, he’ll arrive Saturday at an Asian nations summit in Cambodia where he is expected to reaffirm U.S. ties to its allies across the Pacific as they try to blunt China’s rising regional domination. Biden will also likely deliver a warning to North Korea, which has recently escalated its missile program and menaced its neighbors.

And then comes the main event in Indonesia.

Democrats’ success this week at the polls bolstered the likelihood that U.S. aid to Kyiv will continue, but the G-20 summit comes as the war has tested Europe and strained economies to the brink of recession. Unlike the G-7, which is exclusively made up of wealthy democracies, the G-20 also includes several autocracies. Not all the nations in attendance are expected to rally around Ukraine like most European countries have done.

But it appears the globe’s leading pariah plans to duck the festivities.

Vladimir Putin of Russia will be skipping the summit, Kremlin officials revealed this week. U.S. officials have long wondered if Putin, growing ever more isolated on the world stage, would want to suffer through the frosty reception he’d surely receive from most world leaders on Bali’s balmy beaches. Putin has been treated as an outcast after invading Ukraine, and his military has suffered repeated humiliations, including one this week when it was forced to abandon one of their top prizes: the strategically important city of Kherson.

If Putin had attended, U.S. officials publicly said that Biden would not have met with him — but allowed for the possibility of an informal run-in that would have allowed the U.S. president to denounce Putin’s war to his face as well as negotiate for the release of Brittney Griner and other Americans held in Russia.

But another blockbuster summit is scheduled for Monday.

Officials from Washington and Beijing have quietly worked for weeks to set up a meeting between Biden and Xi, his Chinese counterpart. The two will discuss efforts to “maintain and deepen lines of communication” between their two nations and “responsibly manage competition and work together where our interests align, especially on transnational challenges that affect the international community,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday.

Officials concede the meeting, slated for the sidelines of the G-20, could still collapse although both sides want it to happen. And both leaders enter the summit with their standing enhanced.

Xi recently secured another five-year term as president during a Communist Party congress and some observers believe he could eventually make a bid to hang onto power for life. Biden has long defined the 21st century as a rivalry between the U.S. and China, although at Wednesday’s news conference, he said he was “looking for competition, not conflict.” But he also said he was “not willing to make any fundamental concessions.”

Xi will likely bristle if Biden were to chide him about human rights abuses in China, as well as grow angry if Biden openly condemns Chinese trade policy or any effort by Beijing to eventually move on Taiwan. The president will have to proceed delicately if he wants to employ China’s help in further ostracizing both Russia and North Korea.

“The president should work hard to emphasize to President Xi that a continuation of the war in Ukraine is in no one’s interest — especially China — as it struggles to get out from under ‘Zero Covid’ policies,” said retired Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. “A nuclear weapon would be a disaster. Biden should do everything he can to enlist Xi in convincing Putin to come to the negotiating table.”

Biden has regularly said that when he declared at his first summit as president that “the U.S. is back” as a reliable international partner, it was met with some skepticism. Some world leaders, per the president’s telling, openly wonder if Biden was an aberration before a more isolationist, “America First” foreign policy returned.

In the run-up to the election, White House aides privately worried that those fears would be front and center on the world stage if a number of former President Donald Trump supporters — most of whom denied the results of the 2020 election and refused to commit to honoring the results of future contests — were victorious. If the prominent "Big Lie" candidates won, aides feared, and the GOP swept control of both houses of Congress, foreign allies would be rattled and Biden would enter the week’s summits in a greatly diminished position.

That wave didn’t happen. Though control of Congress has not been officially settled yet, Biden’s Democrats seem poised to keep the Senate and may only lose the House by a few seats.

“The midterms should help the president as Democrats did better than expected and it didn’t come off as a vote of no confidence in him,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “He was also helped by the normalcy of it all, which was reassuring given January 6.”

But the G-20 will also hold a reminder to the limits of Biden’s persuasion abroad.

Over the summer, as gas prices skyrocketed, he traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, despite previously pledging to turn the nation into a pariah. In spite of Biden’s entrée, Saudi Arabia defied U.S. entreaties to hold off on cuts to oil production. The crown prince will be in Indonesia but Biden is not planning to meet with him again, officials said.

And there are plenty of other subplots at the summit.

Biden is slated to meet with the new U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who took over last month after his predecessor, Liz Truss, flamed out after only a few weeks in office due to an economic disaster largely of her making. And it will be the first international summit for Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the first far-right candidate to be elected there since World War II.