Roving Periscope: Post-Trump comeback, G-20 meet may look lackluster
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Being held in the shadow of Donald Trump’s return to the White House in two months, the upcoming Group of 20 Summit in Brazil, beginning on Tuesday, may appear lackluster and discuss the ‘new situation’ besides pending issues like fighting poverty, boosting climate financing and other multilateral initiatives that could yet be upended by Washington from January 2025, the media reported on Monday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached Rio de Janeiro on Monday for the 19th Summit.
The outgoing US President Joe Biden will attend his last Summit of the world’s leading economies but only as a lame duck whom other leaders are already looking beyond.
In the near-absence of the American leader, the main star of the show is likely to become Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has cast himself as a ‘global statesman’ and protector of free trade in the face of Trump’s unfolding “America First” agenda.
Brazil’s left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will highlight his championing of Global South issues and the fight against climate change, the reports said.
Security has been tightened for the event, days after a failed bomb attack on Brazil’s Supreme Court in Brasilia by a suspected far-right extremist, who killed himself in the incident.
The Summit will cap a farewell diplomatic tour by President Biden which took him to Lima for a meeting of Asia-Pacific trading partners, and then to the Amazon in the first such visit for a sitting US president.
Biden, who has looked to burnish his fading legacy as time runs down on his presidency, has insisted his climate record would survive another Trump mandate.
The G20 meeting is happening at the same time as the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, which has stalled on the issue of greater climate finance for developing countries.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for G20 members, who account for 80 percent of global emissions, to show “leadership and compromise” to facilitate a deal.
Reports indicated that fast-developing nations like China were refusing pressure from rich countries to join them in funding global climate projects.
The Summit comes in a year marked by another grim litany of extreme weather events, including Brazil’s worst wildfire season in over a decade, fuelled by a record drought blamed partly on climate change, the media reported.
At the last G20 Summit in India in September 2023, leaders called for a tripling of renewable energy sources by the end of the decade, but without explicitly calling for an end to the use of fossil fuels.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the Summit as his arrest is sought by the International Criminal Court on the Ukraine issue.
Lula, 79, told Brazil’s GloboNews channel on Sunday that the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East would be kept off the Summit agenda to focus on the poor.
“What I want to say to the 733 million people who are hungry in the world, children who go to sleep and wake up not being sure if they will have any food to put in their mouths is: today there isn’t any, but tomorrow there will be,” Lula said.
He had faced resistance to parts of his agenda from Argentina but negotiators from all G20 members had agreed on a draft final statement to be put to their respective leaders.
