When US President Barack Obama heads overseas today for a power round of diplomacy in Turkey, the Philippines and Malaysia, he is to experience the beauty of the Turkish riviera and bustle of Southeast Asian capitals largely from the inside of heavily secured hotels and convention centers.
Obama’s schedule on the nine-day trip shows little room for the light sightseeing or “cultural stops” typically the hallmark of presidential travel.
There appears to be no visit through the Roman ruins at Aspendos in western Turkey or time to gawk at shining gold shrines at Malaysia’s Batu Caves.
However, there are at least eight bilateral meetings with foreign leaders, a string of working lunches and dinners and four summits.
The “all work and no play” schedule is notable for the US president — the son of an anthropologist — who often tries to soak up some of the local color when he travels. This is the president who found time to walk barefoot up the steps of the Shwedagon Pagoda during a six-hour stop in Myanmar in 2012.
He surprised some of his own staff by diverting his departure from a NATO summit last year to visit Stonehenge.
“Knocked it off the bucket list,” he said.
In 2013, Obama capped a Middle East trip with a visit to the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. Photos from Obama’s trip to the Arctic Circle this fall look like tourism board advertising.
Such jaunts are often more likely when a president winds down his tenure and become less sensitive to criticism back home.
However, this trip shows few signs of Obama embracing his globe-trotter-in-chief status. The White House says it has planned time for what it calls “people-to-people” exchanges.
The US president is slated to meet with young people at a town hall in Kuala Lumpur, part of an initiative to influence young leaders, and is scheduled to visit a refugee center there in an effort to draw attention to displaced people around the globe.
In the Philippines, he is due to speak at “coastal facility” to tout maritime cooperation, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said.
“It’s very important — and I think the way the [US] president looks at foreign policy is — that in addition to the meetings that take place in convention centers, that he’s engaging people, that he’s reaching out to different sectors of society that we’re visiting,” Rhodes said.
Still, the meetings in convention centers are the heart of next week’s trip.
Obama is headed first to Antalya, Turkey, the site of G20 economic summit. The meeting is likely to be dominated by talk of the war raging in neighboring Syria.
Obama is scheduled to meet with the leaders of Germany, the UK, Italy and France in hopes of making “incremental progress” in the fight against the Islamic State group. Terrorism and security is also on the agenda for a broader working dinner, a rarity for a group primarily formed to cooperate on economic issues.
The leaders are to gather after diplomats emerge from a second round of talks on Syria’s crisis over the weekend in Vienna.
However, Susan Rice, US National Security Advisor national security adviser, suggested that a major breakthrough was unlikely.
“I don’t think anybody expects a single outcome that all of a sudden readily resolves all of these difficult issues,” Rice said.
One leader Obama would not be meeting with is Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Still, Rice said Obama and Putin would have “ample opportunity for discussion” during informal run-ins.
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