President Obama’s news conference in Ottawa last week with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico was dominated by questions about Donald J. Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Credit Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
WASHINGTON — When President Obama travels to North Carolina and Europe this week, he will press an argument that could define foreign policy in the last six months of his presidency: that Americans and Europeans must not forsake their open, interconnected societies for the nativism and nationalism preached by Donald J. Trump or Britain’s Brexiteers.
Few presidents have put more faith than Mr. Obama in the power of words to persuade audiences to accept a complex idea, whether it is the morality of a just war or the imperfect nature of American society. Yet countering the anti-immigration and anti-free-trade slogans in this election year will require all of his oratorical skills.
Mr. Obama road-tested his pitch over the last two weeks in two friendly venues: Silicon Valley and Canada. This week, he will take the case to North Carolina, a swing state that has been hard hit by the forces of globalization, and to a NATO meeting in Poland, where the alliance members will grapple with the effects of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, known as Brexit.
In Warsaw, Mr. Obama will sit next to Britain’s lame-duck prime minister, David Cameron, whose political career was ended by his miscalculation over holding the referendum on European Union membership. But first, in Charlotte, N.C., he will campaign with Hillary Clinton, his former secretary of state and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who reversed her position on Mr. Obama’s Asian trade deal, formally called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, after many in her party turned sharply against free trade.
“President Obama has made a valiant attempt to build support for freer trade,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University. “But the arguments in favor of free trade lack rhetorical and political resonance, especially amidst a heated political campaign.”
The case for ambitious trade deals, Dr. Prasad said, is that they allow the United States to set the rules for its dealings with other countries, and to wield greater geopolitical influence. Yet those arguments are easily overshadowed by the simple, if dubious, assertion that the losses to the American economy from these deals are greater than the benefits.
“Obama’s ability to sway the debate about free trade has been hampered by those in his own party feeling the heat from constituents who are up in arms about weak employment and wage growth,” Dr. Prasad said.
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White House officials said Mr. Obama would not hesitate to make a strong case for the Trans-Pacific Partnership on the campaign trail. But Josh Earnest, the press secretary, said the president’s remarks on Tuesday in Charlotte would probably focus more on areas where he and Mrs. Clinton agreed.
Then, in Europe, Mr. Obama
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or·a·to·ry1
[ˈôrəˌtôrē, ˈärəˌtôrē]
NOUN
a small chapel, especially for private worship.
(in the Roman Catholic Church) a religious society of secular priests founded in Rome in 1564 to provide plain preaching and popular services and established in various countries.
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