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Opinion
July 12, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 24
“The US is isolated by Russia and China,” Putin quipped after meeting with Xi, who was the guest of honour at this year’s St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) that kicked off on June 6. SPIEF is supposed to be about meeting international investors, but this year Russia's flagship investment confernce was all about China that signed about half of all the investment deals announced at the conference.
But Russia's foreign policy is not just about China. The first sign of a historical shift in the centre of gravity of global geopolitics eastwards was Presi- dent George W Bush's decision to call a G20 summit to deal with the 2008 meltdown, not a G7 summit.
G seven to twenty
Russia was expelled from the G7 as a result of its military campaign against Chechnya – and it didn't care. Last year’s G7 summit hosted by Canada barely registered in the international press and is largely irrelevant today.
The G20 is a much bigger, much rougher playground than the elite G7 club of rich nations. Russia's rela- tions with the west are in the gutter, but those with the likes of Brazil, India and the other emerging markets are flourishing. Putin pre-empted his Osa- ka appearance by giving a big interview to a major media outlet as he always does to prep the ground.
And it proved to be controversial as he told the Financial Times editor Lionel Barber that liberalism is obsolete. That comment brought down oppro- brium, including an editorial from the FT saying that liberalism is alive and well. But is it? In the obligatory summit group photo of all the leaders in attendance – 28 presidents and prime ministers – those following liberal agendas were in the minority.
The G20 leaders are still important as they run the world’s richest countries, but collectively the GDP of the emerging markets is greater than that of the developed world (largely thanks to the size of China’s economy) and just two members – India and China – are home to almost a third of the world’s population.
And this change suits Putin who is at home in
this rougher neighbourhood. You can see why
he might think liberalism is dead as his most important partners in the G20 crowd, key to Russia’s foreign policy, are a much rougher bunch than the political elites from Harvard, Oxbridge and Sciences Po that run the G7.
The G20 is suppose to be a forum for the world’s leaders to deal with the geopolitical problems
of the day and this year it failed to even address most of the main issues.
Russia has been causing trouble for everyone. It has frozen military conflicts in not only Ukraine, but also Transnistria, Abkhazia and North Ossetia, as well as all but taking over control of the Syrian conflict.
Yet Europe’s de facto leader German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke barely six sentences to Putin, according to bne IntelliNews sources at the meeting.
Brexit had already thrown Europe into disarray, but the current wrangling over who gets what top job in the EU’s shake up hijacked the western leaders' agenda, as they spent most of their time meeting each other rather than the rest of the world’s lead- ers, ahead of a crucial vote in Brussels that started the day after they got back from Japan.
The US was not distracted by European politics, but its total ineptness under Trump made it an irrelevance. A video of Ivanka Trump in a pink $4,000 Valentino dress trying to crash a conversa- tion between Merkel, UK Prime Minister Teresa May, IMF director Christina Legarde and French President Emmanuel Macron went viral as it showed her to be totally out of her league. But the fact that the video was released by France’s presidential office only underscores the divisions within Europe.
More generally Europe is divided from within, if you consider the relations between the “old” EU members like the UK, France and Germany with the “new” members like Poland, Hungary and Czechia.