US president’s trip to Europe has had to be repurposed from celebration to consolation, as he tries to convince the world it’s ‘not the apocalypse’

From the White House to Athens and on to Berlin, Barack Obama has for the past 10 days focused his energies on soothing and encouraging allies who are stunned and anxious about the future.

In the wake of the shock US election result, he has become the world’s normaliser-in-chief.



Foreign governments, US Democrats, some Republicans and the media are currently agonizing over whether to treat the rise of Donald Trump to the most powerful post on the planet as a profound rupture in the world order – or just a rather unusual presidential transition.

Obama has clearly made the decision to take the latter course. On the morning after the election he called dejected, tear-streaked White House staffers into the Oval Office for a pep talk. “This is not the apocalypse,” he told them according to a post-election profile of the president in the New Yorker.

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In any other circumstances, that might seem small solace. But Obama was addressing a situation in which someone he had repeatedly called “temperamentally unfit” to be commander-in-chief would, in just over two months, be handed the codes enabling him to launch single-handedly the nation’s 7,000 nuclear warheads.

Right into the last frantic days of campaigning on Hillary Clinton’s behalf Obama was telling supporters: “All the progress that we’ve made these last eight years goes out the window if we don’t win this election!”

He now has to convince the rest of the world, he did not really meet what he said.

In Berlin on Friday, he sought to play therapist to western allies suffering from Trump anxiety disorder. He arrived in Europe this week bearing a message from the president-elect that, despite what he said about Nato on the campaign trail, he was committed to upholding US mutual defence obligations under the Atlantic alliance.

But each time he repeated these second-hand assurances, it triggered fretful questions among Nato officials about why Trump was not saying these soothing words himself.

On Friday, the president-elect spoke to the Nato secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg by phone. According to Nato they talked about the “enduring importance” of Nato and the need for some other allies to spend more on defence.

In a parallel universe, in which Hillary Clinton had won – as both her campaign and Trump’s team had expected until election night itself – Obama’s European tour would have a been a “lap of honour”, adding some last-minute burnish to his legacy as reformer and statesman.

Athens had been chosen as the first stop as the birthplace of democracy, “the source of so many of the ideals and values that helped to build America”, as Obama said in his speech there.

But the message conveyed by publicity pictures of the president in sunglasses walking around the Parthenon, was inevitably tinged by the surprise outcome in Washington. The ancient stones were a reminder of the fragility of civilisations as well as the durability of democratic ideals.

In Berlin, as in Athens, the president’s valedictory trip has had to be repurposed from celebration to consolation.

Ian Brzezinski, a Republican foreign policy fellow at the Atlantic Council and a critic of many of Obama’s policies, argued he had acquitted himself well in his unwanted new role.

“He is conducting himself in a responsible and admirable way. He is going out reassuring people at home and the international community that some of the worst-case scenario outcomes are not likely, and that overreaction actually increases the likelihood of some these outcomes,” Brzezinski said.

The president’s cool demeanour, the determination to be “no drama Obama” to the very end, is not only aimed at stabilising the western alliance and ensuring that the transition of power in US democracy remains a tranquil affair. It is also the best route to salvaging what can be saved of his legacy. No president wants to be a footnote in history.

According to diplomats who have talked to senior White House officials, the priority is to try to stave off the root-and-branch repeal of his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, known as “Obamacare”, and his greatest diplomatic achievement, the Iran nuclear deal signed in July 2015 known as the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action.

White House officials have contemplated late measures that could be taken to further one of Obama’s initial ambitions, nuclear disarmament, possibly by delaying or suspending some of the more expensive nuclear weapons modernisation programmes that have taken root on Obama’s watch. However, there are no expectations of radical steps.

The same goes for some of the other awesome executive powers that have accumulated in the Oval Office during his presidency: the assassination machine represented by the lethal drone programme and the mass surveillance capability of the National Security Agency. The Obama team, diplomats say, see little point in making changes by executive order that would anger the Trump team, and damage precarious cooperation on Obamacare and the Iran deal, and which would simply be reversed on day one of a Trump presidency.

“An incoming president will be presented with two stacks of papers. One is the executive orders of his predecessors, which he can decide whether or not to abolish outright, and the other, are new executive orders for him to sign,” said William Galston, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton and a governance expert at the Brookings Institution.

Although Trump said – after what Obama called an “excellent conversation” in the White House – that he would keep elements of the Affordable Care Act, Galston predicted that Republican antipathy to the programme would ultimately lead to its demise.

“President Obama prides himself on his powers of persuasion, but when you are dealing with someone like Donald Trump, those powers are very limited. I would say his signature legislation is in mortal danger. I don’t expect it to survive in its present form.”

As for the Iran deal, Republican congressman Mike Pompeo tweeted on Thursday: “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”

On Friday Pompeo was nominated as the next director of the CIA.