Obama Wants No Comparison to Donald Trump

Barack Obama is welcomed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel prior to a meeting of the government heads of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Britain with President Obama in the chancellery in Berlin.

Joining the two leaders are the heads of countries at the centre of numerous European Union’s coming challenges.

After Germany, Obama will travel to Peru for the last stop on his trip.

Following a tour to the Acropolis Hill and the new Acropolis Museum, Obama delivered one of his final speeches overseas as a sitting US president.

This impulse to pull back from a globalised world is understandable.

But Obama argued that “when people have opportunity and they feel confidence in the future, they are less likely to turn on each other and less likely to appeal to some of the darker forces that exist in all our societies, those that can tear us apart”.

But on Tuesday, standing next to the Greek leader at a press conference, Obama minced no words as he warned that Europeans “are less certain of their national identities or their place in the world” these days.

Those trends also have created a global elite that seems to live by a different set of rules, such as being able to avoid taxes, Obama said.

“Let me point out that it was one thing that we knew about Donald Trump when he was seeking to become the candidate for the Republican Party, another thing during the election period, and now that he is the President-elect, and it’s quite another when he will be the president of a country that is a major player, a global player”, Tsipras said.

“Any action by a president, or any result of an election, or any legislation that is proven flawed can be corrected through the process of democracy”, Obama said. As Headlines News reports, President Obama will be talking about democracy on its own birthplace, and maybe, talk about the incoming president by defending some of Trump’s motivation.

He said that democracy can be “slow, it can be frustrating, it can be hard, it can be messy”, but that ultimately it is “better than the alternatives”.

On Tuesday, Obama acknowledged the impact of the financial crisis on Greece, which has wiped out a quarter of its economy and led to unemployment rates of above 25 percent.

Dijsselbloem was more sympathetic to the demand for Greece to be given more realistic fiscal targets for its future primary budget surpluses: He said Greece must reach a primary surplus of 3.5 percent of gross domestic product in the midterm, but added, “The question is, what does midterm mean?”

“So here, where democracy was born, we affirm once more the rights, ideals and institutions upon which our way of life endures”, he said.

Also on Monday, Obama reassured the world that Trump will be committed to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as president, despite his past rhetoric that might suggest otherwise.

Alluding to Trump’s campaign suggestion that the United States might not defend Nato allies that did not pay their fair share of the transatlantic alliance’s cost, Obama said he believed Washington’s commitment to the organisation would continue. Delivered at 11 a.m. Monday-Friday.

“We are very deferential and respectful of the fact that we already have a president of the United States, Barack Obama”, Conway told reporters.

Obama plans to return to Greece next year as a tourist, Greek Tourism Minister Elena Kountoura revealed.

The problems that Europe faces are real and immediate – and unlikely to dissipate before the end of the Obama presidency.

About 5,000 people attended the anti-establishment protest, police said.

He says, “these yearnings are universal”.

The U.S. president lingered at the base of the Parthenon, gazing at the columns and glancing around at the panoramic view of Athens as he chatted with his guide, Eleni Banou of the Culture Ministry’s antiquities division. The whole site is closed just for his visit. “He is expected to give a speech Wednesday after touring the Acropolis, the complex of monuments known as the cradle of democracy”.