President Biden is cutting his international trip short and will return to the U.S. for debt limit negotiations instead of visiting Papua New Guinea and Australia as initially planned.

Biden will still leave Wednesday for a three-day G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, but his previously scheduled stops to Papua New Guinea and Australia will be postponed.

He would have been the first sitting U.S. president to visit Papua New Guinea, where he was originally expected to be in the capital of Port Moresby to witness the signing of a new strategic agreement with Micronesia and meet with 18 Pacific island leaders.

The president had planned to visit Sydney, Australia, next week for the annual Quad Leaders’ Summit to meet with the leaders of Australia, Japan and India to discuss initiatives to counter China’s rising influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

MCCARTHY NOT OPTIMISTIC ABOUT DEBT CEILING NEGOTIATIONS, SAYS ‘THERE IS NO MOVEMENT’

Biden told reporters he spoke on the phone with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese about his decision to postpone the trip.

“Defaulting on the debt is simply not an option,” Biden said.

White House spokesperson John Kirby said the president would have the opportunity to meet Albanese and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Hiroshima, where he also has meetings planned with the leaders of Japan and South Korea.

Albanese said in a statement that Biden apologized for not being able to visit Australia and that the two leaders would try to reschedule. The Australian leader also said he would visit Washington later this year.

Biden’s decision not to visit Australia comes after Albanese recently placed pressure on the U.S. government to end its prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is locked in the maximum security Belmarsh Prison in London amid a legal battle over his potential extradition to the U.S., where he could be sentenced to as many as 175 years in an American maximum security prison.