Looks like President Obama is working to clean up Donald Trump’s international messes behind the scenes
This month Donald Trump decided to publicly wreak havoc with U.S. international trade by enacting new tariffs on steel, even while hiring a new top economic adviser Larry Kudlow who is on record as supporting a TPP-like trade deal in Asia. Now it turns out President Obama just happens to be on his way to visit four of the key nations that were involved in his ill-fated TPP deal. It’s far from the first time we’ve seen this pattern play out with Trump and Obama.
Obama is traveling to Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and Japan for high level meetings this week, according to major Australian news outlet SBS News (link). This comes just after Trump seemed to be positioning himself to make a mess of U.S. trade relations with those nations. We’d write this off as mere coincidence if not for the fact that it’s happened before.
After Trump made a mess of U.S.-Canada relations in April of last year (link), Obama had dinner with Trudeau just a few weeks later (link). Obama’s visits to France and China in 2017 also closely followed Trump’s sabotaging of U.S. relations with those two nations. Now Obama is jetting off to visit with TPP nations in Asia just as Trump is making a mess of U.S. trade relations.
This has been happening too consistently to be a coincidence. The question here is just what President Obama has been seeking to accomplish with these well-timed international diplomatic visits. In some instances he’s publicly met with the leaders of those nations, while in other instances he’s merely made a point of showing his face while meeting with influential people in those nations. Even Obama’s early 2017 vacations abroad seemed to line up with Trump’s debacles. At the least, Obama appears to be trying to reassure these nations and keep the U.S. in their good graces each time Donald Trump finds a new way to damage U.S. relations with these nations.
