![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP21160728584147.jpg.jpg\")
After addressing the troops, Biden and first lady Jill Biden flew to Cornwall Airport Newquay, then traveled by car to Tregenna Castle in St. Ives, where they are staying until Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Building toward his trip-ending summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden will aim to reassure European capitals that the United States can once again be counted on as a dependable partner to thwart Moscow\u2019s aggression both on their eastern front and their internet battlefields. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trip will be far more about messaging than specific actions or deals. And the paramount priority for Biden is to convince the world that his Democratic administration is not just a fleeting deviation in the trajectory of an American foreign policy that many allies fear irrevocably drifted toward a more transactional outlook under Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe trip, at its core, will advance the fundamental thrust of Joe Biden\u2019s foreign policy,\u201d Sullivan said, \u201cto rally the world\u2019s democracies to tackle the great challenges of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Biden\u2019s to-do list is ambitious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In their face-to-face sit-down in Geneva, Biden wants to privately pressure Putin to end myriad provocations, including cybersecurity attacks on American businesses by Russian-based hackers, the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and repeated overt and covert efforts by the Kremlin to interfere in U.S. elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Biden is also looking to rally allies on their COVID-19 response and to urge them to coalesce around a strategy to check emerging economic and national security competitor China even as the U.S. expresses concern about Europe\u2019s economic links to Moscow. Biden also wants to nudge outlying allies, including Australia, to make more aggressive commitments to the worldwide effort to curb global warming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The week-plus journey is a big moment for Biden, who traveled the world for decades as vice president and as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has now stepped off Air Force One onto international soil as commander in chief. He will face world leaders still grappling with the virus and rattled by four years of Trump\u2019s inward-looking foreign policy and moves that strained longtime alliances as the Republican former president made overtures to strongmen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The president first attends a summit of the Group of Seven leaders in the U.K., and then visits Brussels for a NATO summit and a meeting with the heads of the European Union. The trip comes at a moment when Europeans have diminished expectations for what they can expect of U.S. leadership on the foreign stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Central and Eastern Europeans are desperately hoping to bind the U.S. more tightly to their security. Germany is looking to see the U.S. troop presence maintained there so it doesn\u2019t need to build up its own. France, meanwhile, has taken the tack that the U.S. can\u2019t be trusted as it once was and that the European Union must pursue greater strategic autonomy going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think the concern is real that the Trumpian tendencies in the U.S. could return full bore in the midterms or in the next presidential election,\u201d said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. diplomat and once deputy secretary general of NATO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sequencing of the trip is deliberate: Biden consulting with Western European allies for much of a week as a show of unity before his summit with Putin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Biden holds a sitdown Thursday with British Prime Minster Boris Johnson a day ahead of the G-7 summit to be held above the craggy cliffs of Cornwall overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most tactile of politicians, Biden has grown frustrated by the diplomacy-via-Zoom dynamics of the pandemic and has relished the ability to again have face-to-face meetings that allow him to size up and connect with world leaders. While Biden himself is a veteran statesman, many of the world leaders he will see in England, including Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron, took office after Biden left the vice presidency. Another, Germany\u2019s Angela Merkel, will leave office later this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are several potential areas of tension. On climate change, the U.S. is aiming to regain its credibility after Trump pulled the country back from the fight against global warming. Biden could also feel pressure on trade, an issue to which he\u2019s yet to give much attention. And with the United States well supplied with COVID-19 vaccines yet struggling to persuade some of its own citizens to use it, leaders whose inoculation campaigns have been slower have been pressuring Biden to share more surplus around the globe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Another central focus will be China. Biden and the other G-7 leaders will announce an infrastructure financing program for developing countries that is meant to compete directly with Beijing\u2019s Belt-and-Road Initiative. But not every European power has viewed China in as harsh a light as Biden, who has painted the rivalry with the techno-security state as the defining competition for the 21st century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The European Union has avoided taking as strong a stance on Beijing\u2019s crackdown on Hong Kong\u2019s democracy movement or treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province as the Biden administration may like. But there are signs that Europe is willing to put greater scrutiny on Beijing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Biden is also scheduled to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while in Brussels, a face-to-face meeting between two leaders who have had many fraught moments in their relationship over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The trip finale will be Biden\u2019s meeting with Putin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Biden has taken a very different approach to Russia than Trump\u2019s friendly outreach. Their sole summit, held in July 2018 in Helsinki, was marked by Trump\u2019s refusal to side with U.S. intelligence agencies over Putin\u2019s denials of Russian interference in the election two years earlier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The president\u2019s first stop was a visit with U.S. troops and their families at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, where he laid out his mission for the trip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":90253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":62,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[101,23,89,12,26,62],"tags":[],"coauthors":[721,3217],"class_list":["post-51338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news-roundup","category-home","category-middle-column","category-news","category-newsletters","category-pentagon-congress"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"7YC5FZXW4NELLFOM4DR34GB2A4","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-military\/2021\/06\/10\/biden-opens-overseas-trip-declaring-united-states-is-back\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP21160738793388.jpg.jpg\")