The months-long standoff between the White House and congressional Republicans over the debt ceiling increase to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations could derail Joe Biden’s upcoming meeting with allies in Japan and Australia.
The US president is scheduled to leave Washington for Hiroshima on May 17 to attend a meeting of the leaders of the Group of Seven. On May 22 he will continue to Sydney for the Quad Summit with a brief stop in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, to meet with the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum. The meetings were heralded as opportunities to deepen cooperation on regional challenges and advance the strategic interests of the United States in countering Chinese influence.
Biden “expects to go,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during her briefing on Friday. Earlier this week, Biden said he’s committed to going, but resolving the debt-ceiling deadlock is “top” on his agenda. Depending on the state of those negotiations, he said it’s possible he could attend “virtually or not at all.”
It would not be the first time that a US president has skipped a summit over budget disputes in his country. Barack Obama canceled a trip to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Indonesia and the East Asia summit in Brunei in 2013 due to a government shutdown over a budget disagreement, and Bill Clinton withdrew from the 1995 APEC Japan meeting. , also during a debt Dispute ceiling.
G7 Hiroshima
Hiroshima, Japan is hosting the 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 Kingdom and the countries of the Union. European.
The leaders will try to align to counter Beijing’s use of trade and investment restrictions, boycotts and sanctions for what they see as “economic coercion.” They will do so through export controls and investment restrictions from their own nations to China, as they seek to slow China’s technological advance and reduce its dominance of the global supply chain.
More than one year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the meeting will also focus on supporting kyiv’s defense and increasing economic pressure on Russia through broader export bans. G-7 members, mainly those from Europe, still export about $4.7 billion a month to Russia, about 43% of what they did before the invasion, mainly pharmaceuticals, machinery, food and chemicals.
As part of his outreach to the Global South, the Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, the host of this year’s G7, invited Australia, Brazil, Comoros, Cook Islands, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Ukraine and Vietnam. .
“A bit like the G-7 trying to create a mini-G-20 without China and Russia,” Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Center for Geo-Economics, said at a briefing for reporters on Friday.
Hovering over the meeting is concern that financial instability from the threat of a US default and the recent collapse of three US banks will spread to the rest of the world. That would particularly hurt countries in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia struggling with post-pandemic debt racked up through infrastructure and other borrowing, mostly 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, “Without having China there, there really won’t be much momentum,” she told Voice of America.
Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation are also high on the agenda this year, with Kishida’s symbolic choice to host the summit in his hometown of Hiroshima, a city destroyed by an atomic weapon in 1945.
What is conspicuously missing from this G-7 is the drive to provide financing for global infrastructure projects as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which was a focus at the last two G-7 summits.
Pacific Islands Forum
From Hiroshima, Biden is scheduled to head to the Papua New Guinea (PNG) capital, Port Moresby, on May 22 to meet with Prime Minister James Marape and other leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum, a grouping of 18 countries and territories covering more than 30 million square kilometers of ocean. There he will seek to establish stronger strategic ties and discourage those nations from making security deals with China amid rising tensions over Taiwan.
PNG officials say defense and surveillance agreements between their government and the US have been finalized and will be signed by Biden, including deals to help PNG mitigate climate change and strengthen deterrence against illegal fishing.
Biden will be the highest-ranking US official to visit the area in recent years, following former Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to the 2018 Asia Pacific Economic Forum in Port Moresby. 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 United States needs to catch up in the region,” said Charles Edel, Australia’s inaugural chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies during a briefing earlier this week. “Years of strategic neglect by Washington produced a strategic vacuum that China was eager to fill.”
Last year, the administration hosted the first US-Pacific Islander summit in Washington. It has established representation in the Pacific Islands Forum and is opening new embassies in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Tonga.
Observers will also be watching for any progress on the US bid to renovate PNG’s Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island that Pence announced during his 2018 visit.
quad summit
After the brief stop in Port Moresby, Biden is scheduled to continue to a summit of the Quad countries (the US, Japan, India and Australia) on May 24 in Sydney, hosted by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
The Quad was formed in 2007 to bolster economic and security relations between the four democracies and eventually evolved into a strategic alignment against the rise of China.
This will be the group’s fourth meeting and the second to be held in person after last year’s Tokyo summit. It is structured around six working groups at the leadership level, on global health security, climate, critical and emerging technologies, cyber, space and infrastructure.
Last year, the Quad launched the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness, with the aim of enhancing the partners’ ability to protect their waters and resources and deter China’s illicit maritime activities.
Australian media report that Albanese invited Biden to speak in front of parliament in Canberra. The White House has not said whether Biden will accept.
Connect with the Voice of America! Subscribe to our channel Youtube and activate notifications, or follow us on social networks: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
