Trump Looms Large Over President Obama's Farewell Foreign Tour

— -- Barack Obama's final foreign trip as the U.S. president this week was planned as a way to reassure foreign leaders after a contentious presidential campaign. But the tone and message of his farewell tour has shifted with the surprise election of Donald Trump.

As Obama travels to Greece, Germany and the APEC summit in Peru this week, the White House is preparing for Trump to loom large over the trip every stop of the way.

"We certainly expect that the election will be the primary topic on people's minds everywhere we go. I think, frankly, that would've been the case no matter what the result, but I think that will be even more so the case, given the direction that the election took," Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, told reporters Friday.

Rhodes said Obama will want to use his conversations with foreign leaders to focus on shared values and the common interest among allies in the success of the next administration.

"No matter our preferred choice may have been in the election, right now we as Americans have a stake in seeing this incoming administration succeed, and frankly, the world has a stake in seeing America succeed, given the leadership role that we play," Rhodes said.

But even as the White House seeks to bring about a smooth transition, there are many questions that Obama simply won't be able to answer for foreign leaders who may look to him for reassurance.

"In some ways, there's nothing to say," Heather Conley, the senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters last week.

"There is really nothing President Obama can do on that front. That's going to have to wait for this transition to happen," said Conley, who said the trip now takes on a "sobering tone."

World leaders are "very concerned," she said, with key areas of international cooperation such as trade agreements, the future of NATO and climate change now up in the air.

"The president has the unenviable task of telling his counterparts and explaining what Europeans are now calling the Trump effect, and they are very worried," Conley said, noting that Europe is similarly wrangling with populist sentiment, as was the case with the U.K.'s Brexit vote.

While Obama's public message will likely resemble his gracious Rose Garden remarks on Wednesday calling for unity, she said whatever private reassurance the president can offer world leaders will likely be on the strength of U.S. institutions.

The "sobering tone" that Conley predicts for the trip will likely be on display during the first stop, in Athens, symbolic as the birthplace of democracy.

"Part of the decision to visit Athens was to deliver a major speech on the state of liberal democracies," she said. "But I think this places the speech and the context in a more sobering note."

The White House has said that Obama's speech was not edited as a result of Trump's win — having not been drafted before last Tuesday — but Rhodes hinted that the president will address the election in the context of a broader reflection on the forces, both positive and challenged, brought about by globalization.

That message will continue, she said, when Obama moves on to Berlin, in what will be his sixth trip to Germany as president.

"The design of trip was supposed to give reassurance that we made it through this campaign and we're going to come out all right. We just have a different scenario now," Conley said.

The White House singled out German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the president's closest foreign partner, having worked with Merkel on virtually every foreign issue over his eight years in the White House.

The warm relations now enjoyed between the U.S. and German leaders is set to take a very different tone, after Trump accused Merkel during the campaign of "ruining Germany" — a criticism he later tempered when he called her a great international leader, apart from "the whole immigration thing."

After his stop in Germany, Obama will make his way to Lima, Peru, for the final leg of his trip and his final APEC Leaders' Summit, where the focus will be on trans-Pacific trade.

Even though the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, which he backed, is sure to see the chopping block under the Trump administration, the White House plans to continue making its case for the benefits of the deal, with a warning that the opportunity to lead in the Asian trading region may now fall to China.

"We continue to think that these types of deals make sense, simply because countries like China are not going to stop working on regional agreements," Rhodes said. "They're continuing to work on RCEP and on signing trade agreements that would lower the standards in the Asia-Pacific that would make it harder for our firms and our workers to compete on a level playing field, which we think is ultimately important to growing our economy."