President Joe Biden is set to visit Italy next month in what is likely the final international trip of his presidency.
This week, the White House announced Biden will tour Italy from January 9 to 12, where he will visit with Pope Francis, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
At a Dec. 20 press briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden’s audience with the Pope will focus on peace efforts around the world. She said Biden will also use the visit to “highlight the strength of the U.S.–Italy relationship, thank Prime Minister Meloni for her strong leadership of the G7 over the past year, and discuss important challenges facing the world.”
Overseas visits so late in a U.S. presidency aren’t typical. The last president to travel overseas in the final month of his presidency was fellow one-termer George H.W. Bush, who traveled in early January 1993 to Moscow to sign a nuclear treaty and to Paris for talks with French President François Mitterrand about the Bosnian war, according to State Department historical records.
“I’m always very careful. Anything could happen,” she said.
Continuing international support for Ukraine could be a key focus of Biden’s visit. The United States, along with its allies and partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Group of Seven (G7) have transferred weapons and aid to Ukraine throughout its nearly three-year war with Russia.
The Russia–Ukraine war has been the leading geopolitical challenge of Biden’s presidency.
In recent months, the G7 partners have been working to prepare new loans to Ukraine, using frozen Russian sovereign assets. These efforts have coincided with Italy’s one-year term as the rotating G7 president.
Meloni chaired a virtual G7 meeting last week where she and the other leaders reaffirmed their support for Ukraine.
Biden’s move to confer with Meloni comes amid some uncertainty about how President-elect Donald Trump will address the ongoing war once he takes office. On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump emphasized calls for negotiations to quickly end the fighting and has had less to say about continuing U.S. support for Ukraine. Trump has also criticized the various NATO members for not contributing more to the alliance’s combined military efforts.
NATO has set a goal to have its members contribute at least 2 percent of their annual GDP to their military, but many in the alliance have failed to meet this spending target for years. While most of the NATO allies have increased their defense spending in the past decade, Italy is one of the member nations that has yet to meet the alliance’s 2 percent target.
Jean-Pierre suggested Biden’s Catholic faith also served as a motivating factor for his decision to visit Italy.
“As you know, he is a proud Catholic and so that is something that he certainly is looking forward to; that and having a conversation about peace around the world,” Jean-Pierre said. “We know that is an issue that his holiness cares about.”
Biden previously met with the Pope at the Vatican in 2021 and again during the G7 summit in Italy earlier this year.
