Who needs the U.S.? The G-19 might be here to stay.
Last week’s G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, ended with a pledge from what’s being called the G-19—that is, the group of 20 major world economies minus the United States—reaffirming that the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement is “irreversible.” The nickname may stick: The summit seemed to indicate that other world powers are determined to unite against the Trump administration’s erratic isolationism…
Climate policy is not the only area where we seem to be entering a G-19 era. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the event’s host, said in a magazine interview prior to the summit that, “It is, for example, open whether we can and should in the future rely on the US investing so much as it has so far in the United Nations’ work, in Middle East policy, in European security policy or in peace missions in Africa.” She continued: “The US will probably not engage in Africa to the extent that would be necessary, particularly since they barely have oil interests any more in Africa and the Arab world.”…
Even on the issues Trump does care about, the U.S. came out of the summit looking less like a leader than a cautionary tale and a catalyst for other countries to step up in its absence. Trump’s well-known antipathy to multilateral trade deals seems to have only deepened other powers’ support for them. Merkel has already reportedly rebuffed Trump’s attempts to enter trade talks with individual European countries, rather than the EU as a whole. And in Hamburg, the union stood united with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker promising countermeasures against U.S. products if Trump followed through on threats to take action to protect the U.S. steel industry. It was probably easier for Juncker to get into a “battle mood,” as he called it, after the EU and Japan agreed on an outline free-trade agreement several days earlier, bolstering Europe’s continued viability as a trading bloc. Trump deserves partial credit for that deal: As the BBC notes, talks between the EU and Japan had stalled in 2012, but “[i]t was Donald Trump’s election, and the inward turn America is taking, that spurred the EU and Japan to overcome their differences. Both want to show domestic audiences they can deliver signature deals that promise new economic opportunities.” This isn’t an isolated occurrence. Trump’s abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has reignited flagging interest among some of the potential members of that deal for a free-trade agreement among the members of the Association of Southeast-Asian Nations—a deal that unlike TPP, would include China as the dominant partner…
But there’s still enough evidence to suggest that globalization and multilateralism aren’t dead as international trends. Those principles are just proceeding without the country that used to be their staunchest defender. It’s far from clear what a G-19 world will look like, but last week in Hamburg, we saw it starting to form.
