Explainer | What’s Joe Biden up to on his 8-day trip to the Asia-Pacific?

Update, May 17: Biden late on Tuesday scrapped his planned visits to Australia and Papua New Guinea. He now plans to return to the US on Sunday straight after the G7 summit to focus on debt limit talks in Washington.

US President Joe Biden has an ambitious agenda when he sets off this week on an eight-day trip to the Indo-Pacific.

He’s looking to tighten bonds with long-time allies, make history as the first sitting president of the United States to visit the tiny island state of Papua New Guinea and spotlight his administration’s commitment to the Pacific. The three-country trip also presents the 80-year-old Biden, who recently announced he’s running for re-election, with the opportunity to demonstrate that he still has enough in the tank to handle the gruelling pace of the presidency.

But as he prepares to head out, Biden finds himself in a stalemate with Republican lawmakers over raising America’s debt limit. If the matter is not resolved in the coming weeks, it threatens to spark an economic downturn. Here’s a look at what’s at stake in Biden’s trip:

Biden first heads to Hiroshima, Japan, for the Group of Seven summit. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is this year’s host for the annual gathering of leaders from seven of the world’s biggest economies. He picked his hometown of Hiroshima, where the US dropped the world’s first atomic bomb in 1945.