President Joe Biden aims to seize on the absence of two key adversaries at this week’s Group of 20 leaders meeting in New Delhi to make fresh inroads with countries that China and Russia have previously courted.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping both opted to skip this year’s gathering, giving Biden an opening to re-establish the US as the polestar of the international system. He’ll take the US case to nations such as Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia—not to mention the host, India—that are eager for closer ties with China and have declined to take sides after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Central to that effort is a push to boost the funding and scope of the World Bank and other development banks, in a bid to deepen ties with the world’s emerging economies and offer an alternative to China’s state-backed lending. The US also plans to push for debt relief for poor countries and announce funding for new infrastructure projects. Biden will then visit Vietnam to announce commercial deals deepening ties with the country’s emerging technology sector.
The White House sees this funding as crucial on multiple fronts: as a form of soft-power diplomacy, to make sure projects maintain high labor standards and consider the climate, and as a counterweight to Chinese and Russian efforts to build influence in countries that will only grow in strategic and economic importance.
“If you look at the US economy and you look at China’s economy, if you look at the US’s alliances and the strength that we have built up in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, we feel very good about the strategic position of the United States, in terms of the unfolding competition,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters.
Biden’s ability to make that pitch will depend, of course, on his own ability to attend. First lady Jill Biden tested positive for Covid-19 on Monday, and if the infection spreads to the President he will scrap his planned travel. On Wednesday, he said that he was tested and “clear across the board.”
Biden’s effort also hinges on whether other participating powers see the G-20 as a still-relevant gathering to steer the global economy. Tensions over the war in Ukraine are only the latest wedge in the diverse and often chaotic multilateral coalition, while China and Russia have sought other forums to exert their influence.
Putin is set to meet North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un in Russia’s Far East, in what could further undermine international efforts to isolate Pyongyang. Leaders will likely struggle until the last minute to find compromise on language describing Russia’s war in Ukraine—risking the first time that the group doesn’t put out a joint communique since its 1999 founding.
China, meanwhile, has seen its influence on energy markets grow after inviting three of the world’s biggest oil and gas powers – Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the UAE – into the BRICS forum, giving Beijing an important alternative to the G-20.
Wendy Cutler, vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said the composition of this year’s summit in New Delhi makes it even harder to prove its relevance.
“The absence of Xi Jinping at this year’s G-20 meeting underscores how this grouping, once the shiny dime among its competitors, now is struggling to produce meaningful outcomes in the midst of geopolitical tensions,” she said.
Xi also faces growing challenges at home, where his Communist Party is battling a struggling economy and rising youth unemployment. Biden last month called China a “ticking time bomb,” citing its economic woes. Bloomberg News
