What happened
President Joe Biden arrived in Peru Thursday for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima followed by a G20 summit in Brazil, with a first-ever presidential visit to the Amazon rainforest in between. Biden’s six-day trip marks the “final major international summits of his presidency,” The Associated Press said, but even as he meets with “heads of state he’s worked with over the years,” the other world leaders have shifted their focus to “what Donald Trump’s return to the White House means for their countries.”
Who said what
Biden was always going to arrive at the summits either “as the confident statesman burnishing a legacy and preparing to hand off to his vice president” or facing “anxious world leaders and fresh questions about whether, as he’d spent four years claiming, ‘America was back,'” CNN said. “He wanted the first. He got the latter.” The gatherings will be “a kind of elegy for a bygone era that defined American foreign policy for most of the president’s life,” The New York Times said.
Biden will sit down with China’s Xi Jinping on Saturday after holding a joint meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol today. But Yoon is already “dusting off his golf clubs, in case the chance to bond with the golf-loving Trump should present itself,” the AP said. “A lame duck is a lame duck,” former U.S. diplomat Ricardo Zúñiga told the Times. “And they know it.”
Biden can’t offer assurances about how U.S. policies will change under his successor, but he will “reassure the world that transitions of power are normal for democracies,” said James Bosworth, the founder of the political consultancy Hxagon. “Biden will get public applause and praise, even as world leaders nervously await the transition.”
What next?
Biden will offer his fellow world leaders the “same message that he’s had for four years as president, which is that he believes that America’s allies are vital to America’s national security,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said to reporters. “When he goes to this Asia-Pacific summit in Peru, he’ll go with our alliances in the Indo Pacific at a literal all-time high,” Sullivan added. “And that’s what he’s going to hand off to President Trump.”