When Trump Meets With World Leaders, He Won’t Be the Only One Thinking About 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/us/politics/trump-g-20-japan.html

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WASHINGTON — By the time the second of this week’s Democratic presidential debates gets underway, President Trump should be ensconced in meetings with counterparts at an international summit gathering in Osaka, Japan. But he will not be the only one in the room with one eye on political developments back in the United States.

World leaders are paying close attention to the developing presidential campaign as they determine how to handle the volatile and confrontational American leader. Amid disputes over trade, security and migration, presidents, premiers and potentates around the globe are trying to calculate whether they can essentially wait out Mr. Trump or will have to deal with him for years to come.

“Leaders around the world are keenly interested in the 2020 election,” said Lanhee J. Chen, a scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a former adviser to Mitt Romney. “The question I get most often when I talk to audiences internationally is: ‘Do you think Trump can win? Can the Democrats beat him?’ It’s not just that they find it interesting; they’re trying to gauge, is this a relationship that needs to last six more years or another year and a half or two?”

The answer may shape negotiating strategies on all manner of issues. For world leaders who conclude that Mr. Trump is likely to be gone by January 2021, it may seem advantageous to slow-walk him on points of contention in hopes that whoever comes next will be more reasonable, in their view, or at least more predictable.

But if the rest of the world is not impressed by the Democratic candidates taking the stage in Miami or convinced that Mr. Trump’s thundering, crowd-stirring rallies on the campaign trail will return him to office until January 2025, the calculations look different. Then they will have to figure out how best to accommodate him or keep off his radar screen for years to come.

“I do think most world leaders, including our closest allies, have given up trying to influence Trump and U.S. policy and are now waiting for a new administration,” said Ivo Daalder, the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama.

On any specific matter of importance, he added, “key allies will engage Trump on the issue, but none think they stand much of a chance of influencing Trump’s thinking or behavior.”

But they should not underestimate Mr. Trump’s chances next year, some experts said. “They may not be done with him,” said Jane Harman, the president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former Democratic congresswoman from California. “It’s way too early to know. They have to assume he is the elected president and he’s the person they have to deal with for a period of time, whether it’s two more months, a year and a half or five and a half years.”

Those calculations will be on display in Osaka, where Mr. Trump will join counterparts for the annual Group of 20 summit meeting hosted by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. While in Osaka, Mr. Trump is planning sessions with Mr. Abe as well as with President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

Many of those meetings will be fraught for various reasons. Mr. Trump’s session with Mr. Xi will be closely watched by markets around the world to see if the two can make progress on resolving the multibillion-dollar trade war that has already led to escalating tariffs and threats of even more, with American farmers, importers and consumers caught in the crossfire.

His meeting with Mr. Putin will be their first since the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, issued his report documenting an expansive Russian operation to tilt the 2016 American election to Mr. Trump. While Mr. Mueller did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Mr. Trump and Russia, he outlined an extensive series of contacts between the two camps.

Likewise, Mr. Trump’s meeting with Prince Mohammed will be their first official session since American and United Nations agencies concluded that Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler was almost certainly behind the grisly murder and bone saw dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and journalist for The Washington Post. Mr. Trump said last week that he would not let that episode disrupt the relationship because of lucrative arms sales to the Saudis.

As if those encounters were not delicate enough, after the G-20 conference Mr. Trump will fly to Seoul, South Korea, where he will meet with President Moon Jae-in to discuss ways of re-energizing a stalled diplomatic venture with Kim Jong-un, the leader of nuclear-armed North Korea. Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim recently exchanged friendly letters after months of silence following their failed nuclear summit meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February.

After two and a half years of his presidency, “most of the leaders around the table are learning to adapt to Trump’s erratic blend of unilateralism, impulsiveness and narcissism,” said William J. Burns, a career diplomat and former deputy secretary of state who is now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mr. Burns, the author of the recent memoir “The Back Channel,” said leaders were not only “uncertain at this stage about the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election,” but they were also “increasingly uncertain about whether the drift in America’s role is personal — and idiosyncratic to Trump — or structural.”

Mr. Xi may be among the leaders trying to wait out Mr. Trump, experts said, which might prompt him to drag out trade talks on the theory that China can withstand tariffs for another year and a half until a different president appears across the negotiating table.

Ms. Merkel and President Emmanuel Macron of France, who will host Mr. Trump in August for the annual Group of 7 meeting, likewise seem intent on putting the relationship on remote control until the president is gone and they can try to repair ties that have frayed during his tenure.

Iran’s leaders, on the other hand, until recently had seemed to be banking on the prospect that Mr. Trump would be out soon enough that they could try to restore the multinational nuclear agreement from which he withdrew last year. But lately, under the pressure of American sanctions, Iran seems to have decided it cannot wait, vowing to exceed limits of the nuclear pact and shooting down an unarmed American spy drone.

Some foreign officials appear to be hedging their bets, treating Mr. Trump as if he will be a two-term president in hopes of avoiding conflict. Both Japan and Britain in recent weeks have hosted splashy visits clearly meant to flatter him. He was the first international leader invited to meet Japan’s newly installed emperor, Naruhito, and he was brought to a sumo match with a Trump-themed trophy awarded to the victor. Britain, for its part, rolled out the red carpet for a regal state visit including a white-tie dinner and tea with the queen.

Then there are leaders who see Mr. Trump as a boon and hope to accomplish as much with him as possible by next year in case he does not win again. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf states as well as Israel have enjoyed his close friendship and welcomed his leadership against Iran in particular.

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel anticipates that Mr. Trump will not have four more years, he may have an incentive to act quickly to annex parts of the West Bank, as he vowed during a recent election campaign, counting on American support he would not have for such a move with a Democrat in the White House.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia knows it can count on Mr. Trump to block congressional efforts to stem its brutal war in Yemen. And Mr. Kim may see the campaign clock as a deadline of sorts to reach an agreement with Mr. Trump, who has made clear that he is eager to forge a lasting resolution to decades of hostility between their two countries.

Whether Mr. Kim will actually agree to a concrete plan eliminating his nuclear arsenal in exchange for lifting sanctions remains uncertain. But some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have been encouraged by Mr. Kim’s public re-emergence, including meetings with Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin, seeing a sign that he may be ready to restart serious talks.

Some foreign officials once thought Mr. Trump might not even finish a single term, assuming Mr. Mueller’s investigation could lead to resignation or impeachment and removal. With that threat fading, world leaders now have to make contingency plans.

“I am quite convinced that, at this stage, they hope he won’t be re-elected so they don’t have to change their basic assumptions on U.S. foreign and trade policy,” said Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to Washington. “You wait patiently and it’s over. But in case of a second term, it won’t be possible anymore. Trump will be seen as a lasting phenomenon like Reagan. Difficult decisions will have to be taken, and leaders hate difficult decisions.”