At the end of this week, the group of the world’s eight leading economies will converge on Camp David for President Obama’s hosted summit on a broad range of economic, political and security issues.
After Obama begins Friday with a keynote address to the Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, the G-8 nations will be joined by Obama’s special guests for special discussions on food security in Africa: Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Ghana’s President John Mills, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete and Benin President Yayi Boni, who is the current chairman of the African Union.
Then it’s on to Chicago for the NATO summit, where Obama will stand on his home turf to lead discussions about three key agenda items agreed upon in conversations last week with Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen: Afghanistan, defense capabilities, and partnerships.
“Recognizing the important contributions provided by partner nations, the President and Secretary General welcomed the recent decision by allies to invite a group of thirteen partner nations to Chicago for an unprecedented meeting to discuss ways to further broaden and deepen NATO’s cooperation with partner nations,” the White House said last Wednesday.
All told, the package of events promises to be like an Obama campaign event with world leaders.
For an election ostensibly focused on the economy, the Obama campaign has taken early hits against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on foreign policy.
In what was billed as one of his major campaign addresses, Vice President Joe Biden even seemed to roll out the NATO summit red carpet at an April foreign policy address at New York University.
“Under President Obama’s leadership, our alliances have never been stronger. He returned Europe to its rightful place as a partner of first resort in dealing with global threats, while at the same time reclaiming America’s place in Asia as an Asian Pacific power — a region where U.S. exports are producing new jobs and driving our economic recovery,” Biden said. “We’ve forged a new relationship based on mutual interest with emerging powers like China, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa — all of which are helping advance American security.”
With numerous swipes at Romney charging a “profound misunderstanding” of a commander in chief’s responsibilities, that speech will instead go down in history as one of the better Biden gaffes: “I promise you the president has a big stick. I promise you,” Biden said in reference to Teddy Roosevelt’s mantra.
Then came the Osama bin Laden gloat and even the commercial, days before the first anniversary of the al-Qaeda leader’s death, that suggested Romney wouldn’t have taken out the world’s most wanted terrorist.
Obama’s defense of that ad turned a joint press conference with Japan’s leader, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan, into a campaign event all its own.
“As far as my personal role and what other folks would do, I’d just recommend that everybody take a look at people’s previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and take out bin Laden,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question about whether the grave-dancing was going a little far. “I assume that people meant what they said when they said it. That’s been at least my practice. I said that I’d go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him, and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they’d do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.”
The anniversary and the campaign relevance provided the perfect opportunity to secretly fly to Afghanistan to sign a transitional agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and address the nation during primetime from Bagram Air Base.
Senior administration officials admitted that, despite the agreement with the Afghans conveniently being ready just at the right time, Obama had planned to spend the bin Laden anniversary with the troops there.
The president dropped “Chicago” three times during that short televised address.
“We are building a global consensus to support peace and stability in South Asia,” Obama said. “In Chicago, the international community will express support for this plan and for Afghanistan’s future.”
If the Chicago summit is Obama’s campaign stage, the NATO partners will be dutifully obliged to line up behind the goals and objectives that may have been agreed to in principle beforehand, but will be crafted by the campaign spinmeisters to look like Obama’s brainchild in the city where he got his start on the road to the Nobel Peace Prize.
And if the Chicago summit is the grand display of his avowed foreign policy prowess, then the G-8 is the opening act.
But one of the players will be conspicuously absent, sending his understudy in his place: New (old) Russian President Vladimir Putin snubbed his White House counterpart last week, saying Obama’s “reset” buddy Dmitry Medvedev would go in his place. The “I’m just too busy” excuse from the Kremlin casts a pall over Obama’s home-turf, camera-ready moment as the great foreign-policy unifier.
One who will be there, though, is the new socialist president of France, Francois Hollande, who was sworn into office today.
Hollande, in fact, gets the royal treatment: a one-on-one with Obama at the White House before the pair head up to Camp David, then over to Chicago for the NATO chiefs meeting. And he’s not likely to hang out by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s side as did his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Their similarities in economic theory notwithstanding, Hollande wants French troops out of Afghanistan sooner — by the end of this year — than later, the end of 2013 as agreed upon by NATO partners.
You could say that the main step forward by Republicans so far in this campaign cycle to counter the Biden-Obama mantra on foreign policy — well, foreign and auto policy: “Bin Laden is dead, GM is alive” — has been by potential vice presidential pick Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who gave a campaign-ish foreign policy address at the Brookings Institution on April 25.
Introduced by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Rubio only mentioned Obama’s name once and, instead of hitting at his many disagreements with administration policy, laid out a Reaganesque vision for global engagement and American leadership as a superpower.
“Above all else, the 21st century provides us the opportunity for more freedom. A world where more people are free to grow their economies. Free to pursue their dreams. Free to become prosperous,” Rubio said. “This is the promise of this century. But it will not happen if we are not engaged. It will not happen if we do not lead.”
As shown in a rather tactless way on Saturday, when Biden and Obama turned a Rose Garden ceremony to honor police officers into a back-patting campaignathon, any event is open season when it’s campaign season.
That includes making the visiting world leaders part of an extended campaign spot.
“For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq,” Obama said at his campaign kickoff in Virginia this month. “Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat to this country. Al Qaeda is on the path to defeat. And by 2014, the war in Afghanistan will be over.”
Despite the wide range of global issues that should be covered at the summits, these are words one should expect to hear a lot this weekend. On an open mic, of course.
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