Why Biden really doesn’t want to cancel his overseas trip

It happens to every American president: a trip abroad gets derailed when crises are unfolding at home.

With the US economy hanging in the balance, President Joe Biden departs this week for a week-long visit to Asia. He’s acknowledged the trip may be scrapped as negotiations on raising the nation’s borrowing limit in order to avert a historic default slog forward with congressional Republicans, an effort he called the “single most important thing” on his agenda.

Privately, however, Biden has told his team skipping this week’s Group of 7 summit in Japan should be a last-resort option only and could send the wrong signal – both to his Republican interlocutors and to foreign allies to whom he has repeatedly insisted “America is back.”

“We’re planning to conduct this trip as scheduled,” said John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, during a briefing with reporters Monday. “Look, on any presidential trip – doesn’t matter where he goes or when – I mean, events back home and around the world can affect travel. But right now, there’s no plans to curtail the trip or cut it short or to not go.”

Even if his visits to Japan, Papua New Guinea and Australia go ahead, however, the looming debt default will still shadow Biden’s attempts to cultivate critical relationships and restore American leadership. The effects of an American default would reverberate throughout an already unsteady global economy. World leaders already enter the talks with their own concerns about Biden economic policies they say are overly protectionist.

His team has not yet made extensive contingency plans for the trip to be canceled and are instead proceeding as if it is still happening. So far, foreign officials say they are expecting to see Biden in person in Japan later this week.

If Biden were to skip this week’s G7, he would likely…