Obama's Big Damage-Control Tour: Saudi Arabia, Britain, Germany

Obama's big damage-control tour

Visiting three major allies, the president is likely to face as many jeers as cheers.

By Michael Crowley

04/18/16 07:08 PM EDT

President Barack Obama will drop in on three of America's most important allies this week, possibly for the last time. But he isn't expecting an adoring reception in any of them.

The U.S. relationship with all three nations is distressed, and Obama will be doing more than a little damage control.

In Saudi Arabia, where he lands on Wednesday, Obama will try to soothe anger over his nuclear deal with Iran and his increasingly public complaints about the Saudi kingdom. In London, he’ll make amends for comments about British foreign policy that rattled the teacups at 10 Downing Street. And in Germany, he’ll confront one of Europe's most anti-American moods and lingering bitterness over NSA spying in Berlin.

U.S. officials say Obama’s agenda will be proactive, bolstering efforts against the Islamic State, helping Europe deal with its refugee crisis and shoring up NATO — “a very consequential series of engagements,” as deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes put it last week.

But Obama will also spend much of his time on the defensive.

The tensions will be highest during Obama’s first stop, in Saudi Arabia. Obama's relationship with the Saudis has been rocky since his first, awkward visit to Riyadh in mid-2009. Things have only deteriorated since over Obama's policy in Syria and his nuclear deal with Iran, which Saudi leaders see as the first step towards a larger U.S. thaw with their country’s mortal enemy.

People who have recently spoken to Saudi officials say that Riyadh’s annoyance with Obama has spiked since last month’s publication of a much-discussed Atlantic magazine article on Obama's worldview, which described the president as “clearly irritated that foreign-policy orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally.”

Obama also told the magazine that Saudis will need to learn to "share" the Middle East with their archrival Iran.

"This is kind of an awkward visit for Obama in the wake of his confessions in The Atlantic," said David Ottoway, a Middle East scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington. "These are fighting words back in Riyadh, so I’m sure they’re going to ask him about what he means by these comments — and they will defend themselves."

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/obama-saudi-arabia-britain-germany-222106