Multilateralism Is Dead. Long Live the G-7

Multilateralism Is Dead. Long Live the G-7

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- By 2 a.m. on June 29, officials locked away in the negotiating room at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, were starting to fall asleep.

They’d been working without a break for two days, subsisting on pasta with shrimp paste and other unpalatable fusion fare, and yet were no closer to drafting a communiqué that all the world leaders present could accept. As the fatigue set in, the “Sherpas,” as these officials are known, decided the only way to stay awake was to conduct the rest of the meeting standing up. Even that didn’t resolve the impasse.

Forums such as the G-20 and the upcoming Group of Seven meeting in France Aug. 24-26 were first dreamed up in the 1970s as a place for foreign officials to come together, fight, disagree, but ultimately resolve issues that go beyond borders. At first the discussion was primarily on economics, but the agendas quickly grew to encompass human rights, international security, global health, and climate change. The joint statement of values typically produced at one of these gatherings, known as the summit communiqué, lacks the force of law, or really any force beyond symbolism. But what it signifies—multilateralism, globalization, international understanding—has formed the foundation of the world order in what we like to think of as the modern era.

That foundation is beginning to crack. In the age of the strongman leader embodied by Vladimir Putin of Russia and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and especially since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, disrupting international norms has become a norm in itself. After last year’s G-7 meeting in Canada, Trump blew up the communiqué he’d agreed to mere hours earlier, reacting to a perceived slight from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Despite their valiant effort, the Sherpas at this year’s G-20 failed to craft language that all of the assembled leaders could agree to and had to insert a special section for the U.S. position on climate change.

QuickTake: It’s Trump Versus the Rules-Based International Order

If the era of agreement is over, what will the future look like? French President Emmanuel Macron has been grappling with that question as his country prepares to host this year’s G-7 in Biarritz. “I have battled at the G-20 and ended up at 19,” he said at the end of the G-20, “and I have battled at the G-7 to be all seven together and then have the U.S. pull out.” Desperate to avoid a repeat of the summit in Canada, Macron decided to abandon the communiqué all together. “We are living through a very deep crisis of democracy,” Macron said on Wednesday. “No one reads the communiqués, let’s be honest. And in recent times you read the communiqués only to find disagreements.”

These are hardly abstract concerns. While Macron and others have framed their search for solutions in terms of improved protocol, disagreements that begin at international meetings have a way of rippling into far less rarefied circles, and vice versa. Trump’s pique at Trudeau concerned the latter’s attempt to retaliate against tariffs the U.S. had applied to Canadian steel and aluminum weeks before. The Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord were both reached through carefully orchestrated international discussions—and both were shredded single-handedly by Trump.

Yet even on the question of how to achieve unity, there’s disagreement. According to a high-ranking German official, Chancellor Angela Merkel also left the Osaka G-20 summit frustrated that once again a major gathering of world leaders had been hijacked by Trump. In her view, these events were turning into opportunities for the U.S. president to put on a show and boost his ego. But Merkel also insisted that reaching a common final declaration still ought to be paramount, however weak the language might be.

Trump isn’t alone in turning international diplomacy into a stage for political posturing, complete with a global audience and background leaders to populate the scenery. Chinese leaders, for instance, have been frequent spoilers. Since Trump took office, however, his bilateral meetings have occupied center stage. Before the G-20, his anticipated meeting with China’s Xi Jinping dominated press coverage. In all, Trump held eight one-on-one meetings in Osaka, including with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, still under a cloud after having been accused of orchestrating the murder of critic Jamal Khashoggi; Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a gun-loving ex-military leader regarded as the Trump of South America; Erdogan; and Putin.

In Biarritz, the marquee event will be Trump’s meeting with the group’s latest populist entrant, Boris Johnson. Since he became Britain’s prime minister in July, Johnson has shown no interest in compromising on Brexit policy with his critics in London, let alone with his European counterparts; he waited nearly a month after taking office to travel for talks with the European Union’s two most powerful leaders, finally making a last-minute dash to Paris and Berlin in the days before heading to Biarritz.

As a former foreign secretary, Johnson is well aware of the diplomatic conventions he’s defying. The danger, says Alistair Burt, a Conservative member of Parliament who served with Johnson in the Foreign Office, is that the rest of the world shifts to accommodate that defiance rather than challenge it. “If you revert to a foreign policy where ‘my country comes first and stuff the rest of you,’ ” Burt says, global leaders risk contributing to the appeal of those who’ve succeeded at home by looking tough and standing alone on the world stage. “Size will matter, the weakest will get picked off, and with that way forward lies more conflict, more confrontation, and greater risks.”

Not that the global leadership has ever been entirely without conflict, even in the days when cooperation was a given. The G-7 used to be the G-8, of course, until 2014, when a U.S.-led coalition moved to suspend Russia from the group over its annexation of Crimea. Later that year, Australia’s then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott borrowed a term for an aggressive challenge in Australian football and vowed to “shirtfront” Putin at that year’s G-20, after pro-Russian rebels in Crimea had shot down a Malaysia Airlines plane carrying some Australian citizens. (He didn’t, but Putin nevertheless found himself isolated.) Years earlier, in 2009, Italy so bungled preparations for the G-8 that some were already questioning its continued relevance.

Innovation aside, some realpolitik ways to limit dissent already exist. According to an Italian official, G-7 diplomats expect the French to announce which foreign affairs topics will be on the agenda close to the beginning of the summit, perhaps only two days before. No full plenary discussion is likely on trade, and a minimal restatement of existing positions is likely on climate change. Should Trump make it impossible to reach a joint position, France, as the host, has the option of issuing its own statement at the end of the meeting.

Formal diplomacy has always been a complicated dance, which may pose a problem more fundamental than those created by chaos-loving nationalists. With or without Trump, the G-7 is already too slow for a world that will have fully digested whatever news comes out of it by the time everybody gets home. The talks among Sherpas have almost always been tortuous—the summit in Japan was less the exception than an extreme example of the rule. Much as with fusion cuisine, the result is usually an unhappy compromise designed to please the tastes of all that ultimately satisfies no one. —With John Follain

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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