Daily Times

President Joe Biden’s departure Wednesday to the G7 in Japan was meant to launch a geostrategic masterclass on rallying the world’s democracies against China. Instead, he will limp into an abruptly truncated journey facing concerns that the US debt ceiling row is about to tear up the global economy.

Biden arrives Thursday in Hiroshima, one of the two cities hit by US atomic bombs in 1945 — a closing chapter to World War II and the start of an era of US leadership across the Pacific that Beijing now seeks to supplant. He will meet leaders from the rest of the G7 club — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan — that has been so crucial in the US-led drive to enforce unprecedented economic sanctions on China-ally Russia for invading Ukraine. However, visits next week to Papua New Guinea and to a Sydney summit of the Quad, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States, were canceled so that Biden can rush back Sunday and negotiate with Republican opponents on the debt ceiling.

For a president who often warns that democracies are in an existential fight to prove their viability against the world’s autocracies, it’s a sobering moment. “It’s extraordinarily hard… to go to the G7 and talk about economic unity against Russia, economic unity against China, when the dysfunction is coming from inside the house,” Josh Lipsky, at the Atlantic Council, said. Biden downplayed the reshuffling of his schedule, saying, “the nature of the presidency is addressing many critical matters all at once.”

But Evan Feigenbaum, a former US diplomat with the Carnegie Endowment, was brutal. “It’s tough to ‘compete with China’ in the Pacific when you’re busy sinking your own boat,” he tweeted. “How do we think we look to the rest of the world?” For Biden, 80, the trip and the debt ceiling mess come at a crucial time. He has just launched his re-election campaign and Americans wary about his age are watching how he copes in the furnace of the presidency at home and abroad.