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Illustration: Craig Stephens
Opinion
Opinion
by Kevin Rafferty
Opinion
by Kevin Rafferty

In Osaka, the G20 summit takes a back seat to the Donald Trump show

  • The relevance of the forum is again in question, and not just because of the US president’s headline-making meetings with other leaders. It’s time to pare down the unwieldy talkfest to make it a gathering of consequence
Phew! Osaka and the G20 – and the rest of the world – survived the passage of the “Trumphoon”, although it left a bill running to millions of dollars for costs, disruption of lives, closure of schools, traffic dislocation and general chaos visited on Japan, not to speak of important structural damage to the pretence of global governance.

Surely, it is beyond high time for sensible leaders – if there are any – to come together to replace this costly, wasteful showpiece with something that works.

US President Donald Trump’s press conference after the G20 summit demonstrated the whirling damage he causes. His opening statement was a gush of exaggerations, half-truths, fantasies and lies: every deal before he arrived was the worst in the world, including Nafta and the World Trade Organisation; his election had turned the US economy and the stock market into the “hottest” the world has ever seen; he could fix any problem in an instant, immigration solved overnight, for one, but for the Democrats’ opposition.
But just when you think he might be certifiable, Trump showed that his bluster is part of his shtick as a real estate salesman with an increasingly opportunistic eye on re-election in 2020.
He reduced the G20 to a sideshow to his series of bilateral meetings with other leaders, including Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, Xi Jinping and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Trump’s choice of friends and enemies is strange. America’s traditional allies, including France, Germany and even host Japan, have suffered from Trump’s demands that they bow to him and take more American goods. There is a huge disconnect between Trump’s claims that the American economy is a latter-day Garden of Eden and his constant carping that allies are taking advantage.

Meanwhile, some of the world’s most brutal regimes bask in the warmth of a calmer Trump. Most obviously, North Korea, where Trump’s 30-second visit on Sunday made the G20 irrelevant in terms of media coverage. Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman have also won Trump’s applause in spite of their outrages against democracy, decency and humanity.
The ayatollahs in Iran and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela get no such indulgence. Trump demands regime change and threatens “obliteration” of Iran if it should challenge him.

Why Trump is a better statesman than you’d like to admit

Xi occupies an especially ambivalent place in Trump’s world. Personally, Trump lavished praise on Xi as “a brilliant leader” with whom he had warm conversations. The grimly bemused look on Xi’s face told a different story. Surely, Xi would be forgiven for his suspicions that at the back of Trump’s mind is a great power struggle, and possibly provoking regime change in China.
There was no need for Trump’s elaborate charade of meeting Xi in Osaka, at the end of which he declared a truce, with no more tariffs on Chinese goods while the two countries resumed talks. His announcement of a partial lifting of the ban on US exports to controversial telecoms company Huawei raised questions of whether concerns about Huawei are really related to security. Or are they commercial concerns on which Trump is using US state power against Chinese companies, in a mirror play of accusations against Beijing?

Xi is not boss in US-China struggle. Neither is Trump. Here’s who is

Common sense would have seen the trade truce announced long before, so that the Osaka summit could stimulate discussion of myriad global trade, economic and political and social issues, not least the threat to the Earth’s existence from climate change.

Instead, leaders spent time and energy fighting against fierce lobbying from the US to get other countries to join in pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. The line was held, with the US openly dissenting in the final communique, claiming that the Paris agreement “disadvantages American workers and taxpayers”.

Osaka G20 ended with broadsides from Putin against liberalism and immigration, and his claim that “the liberal idea is eating itself”. So what is the point of Russia attending a global meeting? With next year’s G20 scheduled for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, it is surely time to consider a better constructed forum to tackle burning issues.

The city of Osaka, with over 2 million people, was disrupted for more than a week, and normal life in the central area was brought to a standstill, just so the leaders could go to the vast warehouse exhibition complex for two days to grandstand their views, largely for domestic audiences.

The so-called G20 is not 20, but the G19 plus the heads of the European Union Commission and the EU Council, plus Spain, also in the EU, as permanent guest, plus other guests, plus heads of an alphabet soup of international organisations.

I counted 38 heads in the official family photograph, but only three women. If you add ministers, sherpas, assistants, flunkies and flakes, you have several thousand people milling around, too unwieldy and conflicted to get real business done. What was Ivanka Trump doing hobnobbing with leaders – unless this is the Trump Organisation’s takeover bid for the world?

Surely it is time to get serious and simplify. Go back to the original idea when the world’s top leaders got together to discuss common problems without fanfare.

Revamp the G7 by adding China and India, include the EU, but get rid of France, Germany, Italy and the UK, as they currently have a voice through the EU, add the UN secretary general, the IMF as global financial watchdog, and one representative each from Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East.

Sequester the leaders with a note-taker for a week in a remote place with no press or publicity. Then let them issue a short, sharp manifesto for action, not the 5,798-word laundry list that was the “Osaka Leaders’ Declaration”.

Kevin Rafferty has been attending IMF, Apec, G5, G7, G8 and G20 meetings since 1976

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