Outgoing President Joe Biden is expected to conclude what will likely be his final major international trip as president this week, leaving Latin America following a series of embarrassing episodes including his bizarre departure into the Amazon Rainforest and G20 organizers omitting him from a group photo of world leaders on Monday.
Biden traveled to Lima, Peru, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the past week to attend the summits of the G20 and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. At the APEC summit, Biden met held an extended meeting with genocidal Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who reportedly used the occasion to scold the American president on topics Beijing will simply not discuss, prominently including “democracy and human rights.”
The APEC summit brings together Pacific Ocean countries and the summit featured both Southeast Asian and South American nations. As is customary with presidential-level summits, the attendees took a “family photo” that made headlines because the president of the United States, typically front and center in such affairs, was relegated to the back row. Video of the leaders taking the photo appeared to show the others smiling and ready, waiting for a late Biden. In America’s absense, Xi took the center position in the photo alongside President Dina Boluarte of host country Peru and Chilean President Gabriel Boric.
At the G20 in Brazil, which brings together some of the world’s largest economies, photographers did not wait for Biden. Attending leaders took a photo together to inaugurate a new initiative, the “Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty,” but did not wait for Biden. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni were also late and excluded from the photo. The three later took a separate photo together.
Again, Xi Jinping took the center position in the photo. The photo also included individuals close to the leftist nations represented at the summit but who are not sitting heads of government, prominently former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
Senior Biden administration officials anonymously claimed that Biden intended to be in the photo but missed it due to unspecified “logistical issues.”
The New York Post narrated a lamentable series of events at the photo shoot in which American journalists looked around for Biden and could not find him, then realized in shock that photographers did not wait for me.
“Yup, he’s right there … he’s behind the palm tree right now!” one reporter yelled to the others, signaling Biden far from the site of the photo.
The Post also reported that Biden administration officials laid the fault of the APEC photo fiasco on organizers setting the picture up in alphabetical order, though American presidents typically take a prominent place in these group photos regardless of how their name is spelled.
Outside of the summits, the most memorable image of Biden from his visit to Latin America is his strange disappearance into the Amazon Rainforest during a stop in Manaus, a Brazilian Amazonian city.
Biden visited Manaus to announce that America under his presidency has spent $11 billion a year in America taxpayers’ dollars on “international climate financing,” showcasing the indigenous communities of the Rainforest as beneficiaries of such climate programs. The White House heralded Biden’s “historic climate legacy” as a major success of his administration.
Following his remarks in Manaus, Biden turned his back to reporters, not taking questions, and appeared to wander into the Amazon alone, providing ample fodder for late-night comedy hosts.
While the optics of his meeting with Xi Jinping in Peru were more flattering to Biden, the content of the meeting – according to Chinese state media – was not. The White House described the meeting as a final in-person opportunity to assess the alleged “successes” of the Biden administration regarding the bilateral relationship with China.
The Chinese state-run Global Times, however, described the meeting as a chance for Xi to scold Biden on China’s “red lines,” topics of conversation that Beijing will not discuss and will express disgust about if raised.
Xi listed four “red lines”: China’s false claim to sovereignty over the nation of Taiwan; “China’s path and system,” meaning communism, “China’s development,” meaning opposition to China’s position as the world’s worst polluter, and “democracy and human rights” in general.
The G20 summit, in which Xi is also participating, will conclude today. Anonymous reports on the mood at the summit, informed by frazzled anonymous diplomats, suggests a deep unease among leftists that the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump will dramatically realign the globalist priorities of international coalitions such as the G20. Socialist Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had for months previewed his priorities at the summit to be global climate financing, calls for global internet censorship, and a global tax on “ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” all goals that the Trump administration will likely enthusiastically oppose.
“Lula knows that Trump’s election compromised the plan to elevate the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro under the presidency of Brazil,” Josias de Souza, a columnist for the Brazilian outlet UOL, observed on Monday. “Reducing the damage depends on Lula’s ability to act quickly to put the signatures of the world’s largest economies on a joint statement that translates into minimal consensus.”
