Foreign leaders jostle for meetings with Trump and Harris, even as Biden ramps up his diplomacy

By Kevin Liptak, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Foreign dignitaries descending on this week’s United Nations General Assembly are looking to take advantage of a choice opportunity to sound out the next leader of the free world, seeking early clues where US foreign policy is heading next.

The most sought-after meeting this week may be an audience with one or both of the candidates running for the White House. Even as President Joe Biden is busy himself with an intensive stretch of diplomatic engagements – including meetings at his home in Delaware, on the margins of the UN talks and an upcoming foreign trip – attention on the world stage is also turning to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Each candidate is looking to cultivate their own diplomatic relationships in the final stretch of the campaign, seizing on this week’s UN meetings as an opportunity for talks that illustrate their divergent worldviews.

So far, only one leader appears set to meet both Harris and Trump next week: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who is making an urgent appeal to both candidates, along with Biden, for sustained help in combatting Russia’s invasion.

Harris, meanwhile, is set to hold talks in Washington with the United Arab Emirates’ president on Monday. And Trump has said he plans to talk this week with India’s prime minister.

Official and unofficial representatives for Harris and Trump have fielded requests from dozens of countries reaching out in hopes of setting up a meeting, multiple US officials said. Some countries have even offered to accommodate or change their schedules to lock in a meeting.

Trump may hold meetings with world leaders that his campaign does not announce in advance, explained sources close to the campaign. And for both sides, more meetings could still be added, sources said.

Harris currently does not plan to travel to New York for the assembly, a source familiar with the plans said. It’s not clear yet if Trump, who was memorably laughed at by delegates during one of his UN speeches as president, will be in New York.

For Trump and Harris, deciding who to meet in the frenzied run-up to November’s election amounts to a question of priorities and time. Advisers must weigh the hours spent preparing for and sitting down with foreign visitors against the imperative of remaining on the campaign trail.

Aides to both indicate neither candidate feels under particular pressure to burnish their foreign policy credentials. Trump has already served as commander in chief and Harris spent the past four years as vice president on a crash-course of sorts on diplomacy, including meeting more than 150 world leaders.

Unlike previous elections, neither Trump nor Harris embarked on a pre-election foreign trip in an effort to demonstrate their mastery of the world stage.

And while global conflicts are certain to test whoever wins November’s election, and have played a role in this year’s debates, world affairs are secondary to domestic concerns – the economy, immigration and abortion – in voters’ minds. That leaves the UN meeting itself as something of an afterthought.

“While President Biden will be there, he will be there as a lame duck. I don’t expect either President Trump or Vice President Harris to show – and there’s a way in which the UN becomes almost prematurely like a sideshow,” said Jon Alterman, senior vice president and director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“It’s not the main event, because the people who are going to decide the future of the way the US engages in the world don’t think being at the UN, engaging with the UN, will either help them, and it certainly won’t help them get elected by the American public,” Alterman said.

For Harris, aides are also attuned to the sensitive optics of agreeing to meet some leaders over others, particularly given what has been an onslaught of requests. Instead of accepting some and disappointing the rest, it’s seen as easier to do only a couple of highly focused meetings at the White House.

She will meet in Washington with President Mohamed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates on Monday, where the escalating crisis in the Middle East is certain to arise. Harris has consistently pointed to the imperative of reaching a ceasefire and hostage deal to lower the temperature in the region, though hasn’t said what, if anything, she would do differently from Biden in attempting to secure it.

And she will hold talks with Zelensky at the White House on Thursday, her seventh meeting with the Ukrainian leader. They last met at a peace conference in Switzerland.

Both her meetings this week will be separate from those leaders’ planned engagements with Biden. And both underscore the reality that if she were to win, she will inherent two major foreign conflicts that Biden has so far been unable to resolve.

Trump, meanwhile, has suggested he would easily be able to resolve the two intractable conflicts simply by picking up the phone, without detailing exactly what he would say.

Since leaving office, Trump has held regular conversations with foreign leaders. He’s met multiple times with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a right-wing nationalist who has led efforts to crack down on journalists and political opponents. At this month’s presidential debate, Trump heaped praise on Orbán, calling him a “strong man.”

So far, Trump has said he is planning to meet this week with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with whom he has shared a close friendship.

“He happens to be coming to meet me next week, and Modi, he’s fantastic,” he said during a rally in Michigan. “I mean, fantastic man. These, a lot of these a lot of these leaders are fantastic,” he said, adding that countries like India, Brazil and China are “at the top of their game and they use it against us.”

He also told reporters this week he would “probably” meet with Zelensky, who has urgently sought meetings with both campaigns to present a victory plan.

Trump and Zelensky spoke by phone in July and met in person when the former president was in office on the sidelines of the UN meetings in 2019. That was about two months after Trump, in a phone call with Zelensky, encouraged him to look for dirt on Biden, resulting in Trump’s first impeachment.

Trump had been expected to meet Polish President Andrzej Duda in Pennsylvania, when both were scheduled to attend the unveiling of a monument, a critical battleground state with a large Polish population. But Trump’s visit to the event in Doylestown was scrapped.

Modi and Duda are both nationalists who have been accused of presiding over democratic backsliding and an erosion of protections for minorities. And both went to extremes to cultivate Trump when he was president.

For Modi, that meant hosting a massive rally held at a cricket stadium in Gujarat State termed “Namaste Trump,” a response to a “Howdy Modi” event held in Houston a year earlier.

Foreign leaders are among the most ardent consumers of American political news, looking for clues of what the future may hold through polls, private conversations and diplomatic information gathering.

It’s not unprecedented for presidential candidates to line up meetings with foreign leaders ahead of an election. In 2016, the last election year when leaders gathered in-person for UNGA, then-candidate Hillary Clinton held talks with then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

Both Clinton and Trump also met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Four years earlier, however, then-President Barack Obama mostly avoided his foreign counterparts in New York as he was in the final stretch of a reelection bid. He traveled to the UN for his yearly address, but instead of back-to-back bilateral meetings, he scheduled a taping on ABC’s “The View” before returning to the campaign trail.

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