Leaders of the world’s 20 most powerful economies met for the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, last week to discuss a wide range of multilateral issues, including international trade, climate change, and international security. This was also a chance for U.S. President Donald Trump to meet face to face with his international counterparts, many for the first time. Trump’s side meeting with Russian President Vladimir took center stage. The U.S. president spent much of his time at the summit in bilateral meetings with other leaders, often neglecting to attend multilateral discussions on issues like the new G20 Compact with Africa initiative. The Cipher Brief’s Fritz Lodge asked Edwin Truman, former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury for International Affairs for his thoughts about the summit.
The Cipher Brief: What is your initial reaction to the G20 summit?
Edwin Truman: There weren’t a lot of surprises in terms of the Summit itself. It focused more on the bilateral than the multilateral discussions – somewhat contrary to the normal pattern. And, in many respects, it involved more politics than economics. More so than usual.
TCB: Can you talk a bit about those bilateral meetings? The meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin garnered the most attention, but there were a number of other meetings with heads of state. What do you think was discussed at these meetings and do they provide any hint as to the Trump Administration’s wider strategy?
Truman: It is common in these kinds of summits to meet individually with foreign leaders – especially for a president so early in his term. Summits like the G20 are a good opportunity to meet some of these leaders for the first time. This is perfectly natural.
Now, it’s clear that the various bilateral meetings of President Trump tended to dominate his discussions at the G20. But in these types of meetings, most of the actual decisions have already been made, so the usefulness of summits is in part to have these leaders talk collectively about what’s on their mind. They did that in the first round of the summit when they talked about terrorism, but my sense is that they didn’t have a lot of unstructured conversations about other issues. That’s partly a result of the fact that the president spent more time in his bilateral meetings than otherwise.
TCB: How do you think President Trump’s behavior was viewed by the rest of the G20 participants, especially the U.S. decision not to sign off on the summit’s communique supporting the Paris climate agreement and a number of other issues, including free trade?
Truman: The communique issues came out approximately the way one would have thought.
On whether foreign leaders came away with a different impression of Trump and his policies, it all depends what their hopes were. I think it’s very much a mixed bag and difficult to tell at this point who felt what way. Traditional allies of the United States – Germany, France, Japan, etc. – were no doubt disappointed. Germany, in particular, had hoped to soften Trump’s views on some matters, but the interesting thing is that they all pretty much held together on the core issues of the 20. And for other countries, many of them were seeing Trump for the first time. He is the new guy on the block, and it was a good opportunity for them to get the measure of the man.
Trump no doubt enjoyed being the center of attention. He was less multilateral in his actions than other presidents have been, but it appears that he met the people he wanted to meet with and did engage in some useful negotiations.
TCB: The European Union and Japan signed a free trade agreement just before the G20 summit, which seems like careful timing. What does that tell you about the future of international trade flows, and do you see this as a reaction to an American retreat from globalism?
Truman: We are retreating from the world. The question is how far do we retreat? Things like the impending start of NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement) renegotiations will give some better idea of that. A lot of this is up in the air.
TCB: Last thoughts?
Truman: If you read the communique, the declaration has 12 pages and the action program has 14 pages. There is a lot packed into that, but basically it’s packed in a way that says, “we approve of what’s been going on.” That is important, it provides political impetus to ongoing discussions and negotiations. But there weren’t many breakthroughs, the biggest thing is this issue of the G20 Compact with Africa – which is designed to promote investment and infrastructure in Africa. This is really an attempt by the Germans and Europeans to say, “well, if we improve the economic conditions in Africa, then there will be less issues of migration from Africa.” This is a pretty sensible position and we should be doing the same thing with respect to Central America.
That’s the major new initiative. How successful it will be we don’t yet know, and it will take a decade until we know whether it works.
The protests and rioting in Hamburg against the G20 was also a major problem. To some extent it was inevitable, but it underlines the fact that to some degree the leaders of almost all countries are out of touch with a substantial fraction of their populace. Even in a country as prosperous as Germany.
