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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said that US President-elect Joe Biden wants to “revitalize” the relationship between the two countries, something that should be easy enough after Ardern’s previous encounters with Donald Trump. .
The two leaders had a “positive and warm” phone call, Ardern said Monday, and she had invited Biden to visit her, saying: “She spoke of her fond memories of visiting New Zealand years ago. He was very happy to be invited back here. “
He said he had felt Biden’s desire to work constructively on trade and other issues of mutual concern, such as responding to climate change. “We talked about Covid-19 and the president-elect spoke positively about New Zealand’s response to the pandemic,” the prime minister said.
“I offered him and his team access to New Zealand health officials to share their experience on what we have learned on our Covid-19 journey.” New Zealand’s response to the pandemic has been one of the most successful in the world, in stark contrast to the situation in the United States.
He told reporters that he raised “the importance of organizations like the World Trade Organization for a country like New Zealand … [and] our enthusiasm to support the work to unblock some of the problems we have experienced. “
The call had a completely different tone than his previous interactions with Trump, whose administration had called for a fundamental reboot at the WTO and sabotaged its ability to resolve disputes.
In their first face-to-face meeting at the East Asia summit, Trump pointed to Ardern and apparently jokingly said that “this lady caused a lot of unrest in her country” in reference to the 2017 elections that led to her becoming First minister. , beating his right-wing rival. Ardern later said that she replied that “no one left when I was elected.”
When asked at the time about her impressions of Trump, Ardern was diplomatic. “He is consistent,” he said. “He is the same person you see behind the scenes as he is in the public or in the media.”
When the pandemic occurred, Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the “large increase in New Zealand” of Covid cases – a cluster of 87 new cases emerged in August after 102 days without community infection – upset many New Zealanders, including Ardern. He didn’t mention Trump, but made his point with data. “To give you just one example, the United States has 16,563 cases per million people. We are 269 cases per million people, ”Ardern said at the time.
Trump congratulated Ardern on his victory in 2017, but was notably absent from the list of world leaders who made contact after his recent election victory.
