Obama – the European farewell tour. Oh, what could have been. The ageing rocker playing the old favourites. Instead there’s a mournful downbeat tempo to the playlist, a feel of a legacy in the balance, almost dirge-like.
It could have been very different. If Hillary Clinton had won: a victory tour, with reassuring notes of continuity and clarion calls to push on with the great projects of trade, confronting common enemies like Russia and global warming.
Instead, the European support act – Angela Merkel, his “closest international partner”, and the leaders of Britain, France, Italy and Spain – want to play a different tune, interested only in hearing how much Donald Trump will dismantle. President Obama becomes, in what could have been his moment of triumph, a conduit for his nemesis. Today they discuss stepping up sanctions against Moscow in the knowledge that, come January, his successor may lift them. All Obama can do is to try to reassure allies that the president-elect has assured him he wants to maintain core relationships around the world, including with Nato.
There was, however, an almost wistful, critical subtext to some of what in other times might have sounded like pieties. In Greece on the first day of his visit he reflected on democracy, imperfect for all its flaws, fostering hope over fear. “Even if progress follows a winding path – sometimes forward, sometimes back – democracy is still the most effective form of government devised by man,” he told his audience, almost an apology for what America is now inflicting on the world.
And there was a defiant, albeit forlorn, attempt to suggest that, whatever Trump might wish, clocks simply cannot be turned back. Obama and Merkel wrote a joint guest piece for German magazine Wirtschaftswoche: "The future is already happening and there will be no return to a world before globalisation," they wrote, stressing the benefits of the free trade deal being negotiated between the EU and US that Trump has threatened to tear up. "We owe it to our businesses and our citizens – the whole global community, even – to broaden and deepen our cooperation."
They reiterated their commitment to the Paris climate accord, “the framework for the joint protection of our planet”, and to shared humanitarian values that “obligate us” to provide aid “for many millions of refugees worldwide because we know that the true strength of our values is measured by how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable.” Trump has accused Merkel of “ruining Germany” with her refugee policy.
Some see the trip as a passing on to Merkel of the mantle of "leader of the free world". Or perhaps it's just by way of a last reprise of the Boss's answer to Trump: "I'm ten years burning down the road, Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go . Born in the USA."