Trump holds series of meetings with foreign leaders

Donald Trump plans to meet with Poland’s right-wing president this week, the latest in a series of private interactions with leaders or emissaries from countries from the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe, many of whom share a affinity with his type of politics. .

Trump is expected to have dinner in New York with the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda on Wednesday, his only day off from court this week, according to two people briefed on the arrangements who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

Duda mentioned the meeting as a possibility on social platform The New York Times will approach his office to ask for comments.

It will be a reunion for Trump and Duda, who once proposed naming a military base after Trump and who now shares power in Poland with a rival whose policies are much more aligned with the president’s. Joe Biden.

Trump’s other recent interactions with foreign leaders and their representatives include a phone call he had last month with the king Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa from Bahrain, which had not been previously revealed.

A senior Bahraini official described it as “a social call.”

The increasingly accelerated pace of this rapprochement abroad is, in a sense, not surprising.

Foreign leaders read the polls and understand that Trump could return to power.

Richard Haass, a former diplomat and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said there was nothing wrong with such interactions.

“There is nothing unusual – or to put it positively, it is all usual – about foreign leaders meeting with the American equivalent of the opposition leader“Hass said.

Trump would cross a red line, however, with any attempt to influence the words or actions of foreign leaders, for example by calling for expressions of support or for them to take steps to undermine Biden’s policies, he said.

“So he is carrying out a foreign policy,” Haass said, adding:

“In principle, all this is fine. It just depends on the actual content in practice.”

However, the meetings carry political sensitivities.

Many foreign embassies are carrying out their outreach activities quietly, through emissaries, to avoid angering the Biden administration.

And the countries that have been directly connected to Trump through their heads of state tend to be governments whose leaders have fought with Biden or who had a relationship with Trump as president.

In late March, for example, Trump spoke by phone with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

The call was organized by Senator Lindsey GrahamR-South Carolina, who was visiting the crown prince at the time, two people familiar with the call said.

As president, Trump had a warm relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed and deflected outrage over the 2018 assassination of the Saudi dissident. Jamal Khashoggi, in an operation that U.S. intelligence officials say was carried out on the orders of the crown prince.

Biden, by contrast, condemned Crown Prince Mohammed for the murder, although they have since established a working relationship.

In early March, Trump received the prime minister Viktor Orban from Hungary at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida.

Orban is a right-wing nationalist who has been at odds with Biden and other European leaders over the war in Ukraine and his efforts to suppress the Hungarian press and judiciary.

Orban has often seemed – like Trump – to be sympathetic to the president’s goals. Vladimir Putin of Russia and has endorsed Trump’s campaign for president. He did not meet with Biden during his visit to the United States.

Dinner with Duda on Wednesday also follows a similar pattern.

Duda represents Poland’s powerful conservative nationalist party, which dominated the country for years until recently and, similar to Orban, clamped down on the press and judiciary and clashed with the European Union.

Since the 2023 national elections, Duda has shared power with a bitter political rival, Prime Minister Donald Tuska former senior EU official who opposes Duda and Duda’s Law and Justice Party as a defender of democracy.

In March 2023, Duda and Tusk put aside their differences and paid a joint visit to Biden at the White House to show a united front against Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Unlike Orban, Duda is a unwavering critic of the Russian invasion.

But Duda will rekindle close ties with Trump, who hosted the Polish president at the White House in June 2020, just four days before Duda faced a hotly contested re-election vote.

Some analysts said the meeting represented a inappropriate endorsement to Duda, who during the visit proposed naming a planned US military base in Poland”Fort Trump“.

Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the meetings and calls with world leaders “reflect a recognition of what we already know here at home.

“When President Trump is sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, the world will be safer and America will be prosperous.”

Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain, agreed that Trump’s meetings were not extraordinary.

But he said it was unusual for a foreign leader to openly side with the US president’s main opponent.

“What is unusual here is that heads of state generally remain neutral in their relationships,” Fontaine said.

“In Orban’s case, at least, he has publicly joined Trump.”

Nothing requires Trump to coordinate his meetings with the US State Department.

Spokespeople for the agency did not respond when asked if the department had had any communications with Trump’s team.

Other foreign approaches to Trump have less to do with challenging Biden and more to do with build a personal relationship to place the country in a more favorable position should Trump resume the presidency.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine publicly invited Trump to visit his country to see the war with his own eyes.

A person close to Zelensky, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said the Ukrainian president appreciated that the Trump administration was the first to provide lethal aid to Ukraine, something the Obama administration had not done.

This person said that several people close to Trump who are ardent supporters of Ukraine have pushed a message similar to what Zelensky has said publicly.

Trump has made several statements about Ukraine since the invasion that have offered little clarity about his thinking on the conflict, but he has raised concerns by saying that would encourage Russian aggression against NATO members who do not meet their financial commitments to the organization.

Current and former representatives of the British government have also been in contact with Trump.

The Finnish ambassador to the United States, Mikko Hautalaapproached him directly and tried to persuade him of his country’s value to NATO as a new member, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

For US officials, Trump’s conversation with Crown Prince Mohammed was a lot more worrying.

Biden is negotiating a delicate security deal with Saudi Arabia that could be part of a broader deal, one that would see Riyadh establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel for the first time.

Since such an agreement could include new steps toward a Palestinian state, Biden officials see it as a critical exit ramp from the conflict in the Gaza Strip.

But some officials fear that Trump, whose real estate company has a deal with a Saudi company for a project in Oman, may try to persuade Crown Prince Mohammed to wait until after the November election, thus giving Trump the opportunity to preside over the agreement as president.