Washington CNN —
Foreign dignitaries attending the United Nations General Assembly this week are seizing the opportunity to probe the next leader of the free world, seeking early clues about where U.S. foreign policy might go next.
The most anticipated meeting this week may be with one or both of the candidates seeking the White House. While President Joe Biden is busy with a string of diplomatic activities, including meetings at his Delaware home, talks on the sidelines of a United Nations conference, and upcoming foreign visits, the world’s attention is also on Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
The candidates are seeking to cultivate their own diplomatic relationships in the final stages of the campaign and see this week’s U.N. meeting as an opportunity to present their differing world views.
So far, the only leader scheduled to meet with both Harris and Trump next week is Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who, along with Biden, has urgently urged both candidates for continued support in combating Russian aggression.
Meanwhile, Harris is due to meet with the president of the United Arab Emirates in Washington on Monday, and Trump has said he plans to meet with India’s prime minister this week.
Trump posted on social media on Sunday that he met with Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Qatar has played a key mediator in ongoing efforts with Hamas to reach a ceasefire agreement and resolve the hostage situation in Gaza.
“The Amir has made progress at every level in record time and proven himself to be a great and strong leader for his country,” Trump wrote. “He is also someone who strongly believes in peace in the Middle East and around the world. We have had a great relationship while I was in the White House, and it will be even stronger this time around!”
Official and unofficial representatives of Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump are fielding requests from dozens of countries hoping to set up meetings, according to U.S. officials, with some offering to make adjustments or change dates to make the meetings happen.
A person close to the Trump campaign said Trump may meet with world leaders who his team has not previously announced, and that more meetings could be added for both sides.
Harris has no current plans to travel to New York for the General Assembly, the people said. It is not yet clear whether Trump, who drew laughter from delegates during his United Nations speech as president, will be there.
For Trump and Harris, deciding who to meet with in the hectic run-up to the November election is a matter of priorities and time, as advisers must balance time spent hosting and meeting with foreign visitors against the need to continue campaigning.
Aides to both candidates suggest neither feels any particular pressure to burnish their foreign policy records: Trump is already commander in chief, while Harris has had something of a crash course in diplomacy over the past four years as vice president, meeting with more than 150 world leaders.
Unlike previous elections, neither Trump nor Harris undertook any pre-election trips to demonstrate their abilities on the world stage.
Global conflicts will certainly be a test of whoever wins the November election, and have played a role in this year’s debates, but in voters’ minds, world affairs take a back seat to domestic issues (the economy, immigration, abortion), so the UN conference itself has kind of taken a back seat.
“President Biden will attend, but he will do so as a lame duck. Neither President Trump nor Vice President Harris will attend. There’s a chance the U.N. could become a premature sideshow,” said Jon Alterman, senior vice president and Middle East program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“The UN is not a major event because the people who are going to decide how America engages in the world in the future don’t believe it’s in their interest to attend or be involved with the UN, and they don’t believe it’s going to help them get elected by the American people,” Alterman said.
Aides are also sensitive to the subtleties of Ms. Harris agreeing to meet with some leaders over others, especially given the deluge of requests: It seems easier to hold just a few highly focused meetings at the White House than to accommodate some and disappoint the rest.
Harris is scheduled to meet with United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed in Washington on Monday in what is sure to be an escalating crisis in the Middle East. She has consistently said a ceasefire and a hostage agreement are needed to ease tensions in the region, but she has not said what, if anything, she would do differently than Biden to get there.
She is also scheduled to meet with President Zelensky at the White House on Thursday, marking her seventh meeting with the Ukrainian leader. The two last met at a peace conference in Switzerland.
The two meetings this week are separate from those leaders’ planned meetings with Biden, and underscore the reality that if she wins, she will be faced with two major foreign conflicts that Biden has so far been unable to resolve.
Trump, meanwhile, suggested the two intractable conflicts could be easily resolved with a simple phone call, without specifying what he would say specifically.
Since leaving office, Trump has met regularly with foreign leaders, including multiple times with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a right-wing nationalist who has led a crackdown on journalists and political opponents. During a presidential debate this month, Trump praised Orban, calling him a “strong man.”
So far, Trump has said he plans to meet with his close friend, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this week.
“He’s coming to see me next week, but Modi is brilliant,” he said at a rally in Michigan. “A really brilliant guy. A lot of these leaders are brilliant,” he said, adding that countries like India, Brazil and China “are doing great and they’re using that against us.”
The president also told reporters that he would “probably” meet with Zelenskiy this week, who has called for urgent talks with both sides to lay out a victory plan.
Trump and Zelensky spoke by phone in July and met in person on the sidelines of a U.N. conference in 2019 while the former president was in office. This came about two months after Trump urged a corruption investigation into Biden in a call with Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump had been scheduled to meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda for the unveiling of a monument in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state with a large Polish population, but his planned visit to the ceremony in Doylestown was canceled.
Both Modi and Duda are nationalists accused of leading a backslide of democracy and the erosion of minority protections, and they went to extremes to cultivate Trump during his presidency.
For Modi, that meant hosting a massive rally dubbed “Namaste Trump” at a cricket stadium in Gujarat as a response to the “Howdy Modi” event held in Houston a year earlier.
Foreign leaders are some of the most avid consumers of American political news, searching for clues about what the future holds through opinion polls, private conversations and diplomatic intelligence.
It is unprecedented for a presidential candidate to schedule meetings with foreign leaders before an election: In 2016, the last election year in which leaders gathered in person at the UN General Assembly, then-candidate Hillary Clinton met with then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Clinton and Trump also met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
But four years earlier, then-President Barack Obama was in the final stages of his reelection bid and in New York he largely avoided meeting with foreign colleagues. He visited the United Nations to deliver his annual address, but instead of a string of bilateral meetings, he scheduled a taping of ABC’s “The View” before returning to the campaign trail.
This story has been updated with additional information.