Obama camp previews foreign trip
Posted: Friday, July 18, 2008 4:10 PM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
Security
From NBC/NJ's Athena Jones
Obama’s campaign is not viewing his five-country swing through Europe and the Middle East next week as a political trip, his foreign policy advisers said today on a conference call previewing the much-talked-about tour.
“The trip is not at all a campaign trip, a rally of any sort,” said Robert Gibbs, the campaign's senior strategist for communications and message.
Obama -- who senior foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough said had “a very productive conversation” with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in planning the trip -- will discuss issues ranging from nuclear non-proliferation to energy security to climate change and combating terrorism with a series of leaders in Jordan, Israel, Germany, France, and Great Britain.
VIDEO: NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports on Barack Obama's planned visit to Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Europe, the senator is set to meet with British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown and opposition leader
David Cameron; Germany’s Chancellor
Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister
Frank-Walter Steinmeier; and French President
Nicolas Sarkozy,
the aides confirmed.
In the Middle East, Obama will meet with King Abdullah of Jordan and several Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu. He also plans to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
Obama adviser Susan Rice said the goal of the trip is to deepen important relationships and exchange views with the leader of countries whose partnership with the United States is vital to the country’s national security and to explore ways to enhance cooperation with those countries.
“It is important to note it is not our intent to make policy or negotiate. We won’t do so,” she said, before echoing a line used by Obama himself at a press conference last weekend. “There is one president of the United States at any given time, and we will certainly honor and respect that. But we look very much forward to the opportunity for Sen. Obama to have an in-depth exchange on a range of substantive issues at a time when there are many pressing challenges before us.”
The trip comes in the midst of a general election campaign against John McCain, with at least one recent poll suggesting that voters feel more comfortable with the Arizona Republican on foreign policy issues. It also comes as McCain's campaign has launched its first negative TV ad of the general election.
Aides would not confirm the location of Obama’s planned speech in Berlin, which Gibbs said would be “a substantive speech about American and European relations.” The issue of location raised some controversy when it was reported that aides had sought to have the senator speak at the Brandenburg Gate, an 18th-century monument that became a symbol of the Cold War and is now a symbol of a reunified Germany.
“The one thing that Sen. Obama made clear to us very early is that he didn’t think it made sense at all for him to speak at the Brandenburg Gate, which he thought would be perhaps too presumptuous,” said McDonough, who noted the campaign was looking at a variety of locations that would meet the goals of the campaign and of its German hosts.
Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy adviser and a senior speechwriter, said Berlin was an appropriate place to speak “because of its history in the 20th century and the need to cooperate as closely in the 21st century as we did in the 20th with our European allies and with our German allies.”
Among the advisors who will accompany Obama on the trip include Rice, Gibbs, Rhodes, Dennis Ross, Jim Steinberg, Richard Danzig, Anthony Lake, and Greg Craig.
