You're reading: Obama confident Europeans will resolve debt crisis

LOS CABOS, Mexico — President Barack Obama voiced confidence June 19 in Europe's ability to "break the fever" of its raging debt crisis as he sought to calm both global financial markets and the election-year worries of voters at home.

Obama, speaking at the close of the Group of 20 economic
summit, said Europe’s leaders showed a “heightened sense of urgency”
during two days of talks in this Mexican resort. The president
maintained that Europe had the capacity to solve the crisis on its own,
indicating the U.S., still battling its own economic woes, would not be
offering any financial pledges to help its international partners.

“Even
if they cannot achieve all of it in one fell swoop, I think if people
have a sense of where they are going that can provide confidence and
break the fever,” Obama said in a news conference that brought to a
close his last foreign trip before the November election.

Obama
waded deep into the summit discussions on Europe’s debt crisis, which
could have repercussions both for a U.S. economy still struggling to
recover from a recession and Obama’s own re-election prospects. He
acknowledged that “all of this affects the United States” but that his
administration does not have control over how quickly the Europeans fix
the problems.

“All of these issues, economic issues, will potentially have some impact on the election,” Obama said.

Mindful
of his audience of voters in the U.S., Obama said: “The best thing the
United States can do is to create jobs and growth in the short term even
as we continue to put our fiscal house in order over the long term.

While
the European crisis consumed much of the summit, Obama broke away from
the main meetings to tackle other pressing global issues, most notably
the violence in Syria. Obama described his meetings with the leaders of Russia
and China, two countries that have stymied U.S. efforts to take action
against Syria at the United Nations, as productive but said they were
“not aligned” with the U.S.

“I don’t think it would be fair to say that the Russian
and the Chinese are signed on at this point,” Obama said. “But I do
think they recognize the grave dangers of all-out civil war.”

More
than 14,000 people have been killed in months of clashes between rebels
and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to Syrian
opposition groups. While the U.S. and other nations have long called for
Assad to leave power, Russia has refrained from doing so.

“No one has the right to decide for other people who should be in power and who should step aside,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his own post G-20 news conference.

Election-year
politics followed Obama abroad. Asked about criticism of his economic
proposals from an adviser to his Republican rival Mitt Romney, Obama
gave a prickly response.

“We have one president at a time and one
administration at a time,” he said. “And I think traditionally the
notion has been that America’s political differences end at the water’s
edge.”

Despite Obama’s endorsement of European efforts, he said
the responsibility for creating jobs back in the U.S. lay with his
administration and congressional lawmakers, not Europe. He urged
Congress to focus on steps they could take to boost job creation and
economic growth, pitching legislation he proposed months ago that has
little chance of garnering Republican support in an election year.

“I’ve
consistently believed that if we take the right policy steps, if we’re
doing the right thing, then the politics will follow and my mind hasn’t
changed on that,” Obama said.

The European stew of high debt, high
borrowing rates and high unemployment poses huge spillover risks to the
American economy and Obama’s political future.

The U.S. economy
is in a tentative recovery amid a slump in hiring and indications that
the housing market is healing. Those mixed signals have muddled Obama’s
re-election prospects as Romney mounts a campaign singularly focused on
the state of the U.S. economy.

Underscoring the stakes, Obama held
a lengthy private meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose
country plays a pivotal role in addressing the crisis. Obama also held a
joint meeting Tuesday with leaders from Britain, Germany, Italy,
France, Spain and the European Union.

European leaders are
expected to outline the details of their next steps to address the
continent’s crisis during a summit in Brussels next week.

Despite
the words of unity during the Mexico meetings, European leaders showed
signs that they have heard enough about their troubles, particularly
from Americans. Memories linger of the 2008 financial crash that was
born in the United States and destroyed jobs and wealth.

“The
eurozone has a serious problem, but it is certainly not the only
imbalance in the world economy,” Italian Prime Minster Mario Monti said on June 19 . He said the United States’ own financial problems were
mentioned in G-20 talks “by almost everybody, including President
Obama.”

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso took an
aggressive tone with reporters on Monday, also pointing some blame at
North America and saying, “Frankly we are not coming here to receive
lessons in terms of democracy.”