The joint communiqu\u00e9 addressed U. S. concerns about trade, but that there was an agreement at all was significant.<\/b>
\nIt is somewhat fitting that G20 leaders agreed on a statement hours after the death of George H. W. Bush. In normal times, Saturday\u2019s announcement in Argentina would hardly be unusual. Diplomats negotiate the agendas and communiqu\u00e9 of such meetings for weeks and months before national leaders affix their signatures to them.
The Trump administration has been loath to support statements in favor of global trade or efforts to combat climate change. Bush, who died late Friday, was, by contrast an architect of the post-Cold War-era world order, an arch proponent of free trade and a committed multilateralist. The system\u2014built in part by the 41st American president\u2014is now in peril because it appears that the 45th believes it is unfair to the United States. Donald Trump says he believes in what he describes as fair trade, and has levied hefty tariffs on American trading partners, including Western allies, in an attempt to revive employment in the U. S. manufacturing sector. (Most economists call this worldview flawed.)
The G20, which draws together economies as diverse as Canada\u2019s, South Africa\u2019s and Saudi Arabia\u2019s, on Saturday agreed to reform the World Trade Organization and recognized the benefits of multilateral trade, but failed for the first time to speak out against \u201cprotectionism\u201d: a concession to President Trump. Additionally, the group agreed to implement the Paris climate accord, but noted that Washington \u201creiterates its decision to withdraw.\u201d
\u201cToday is a great day for the United States,\u201d a senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters. \u201cThe G20 just adopted a communiqu\u00e9 by consensus. It\u2019s a consensus that meets many of the U. S.’s biggest objectives.\u201d
The joint communiqu\u00e9 is a departure of sorts for the Trump administration, which has used international summit meetings to chip away at the global order built by the United States after World War II. It\u2019s not so much that the president\u2019s team is unwilling to reach compromise with other nations on a host of issues such as trade and climate change, but that Trump himself appears to question the usefulness of multilateral diplomacy and the U. S.-led world order.
This year alone, Trump retracted U. S. support for a joint statement at the end of June\u2019s G7 summit in Quebec and last month, the APEC summit in Papua New Guinea ended without a joint statement because of disagreements between Washington and Beijing over the term \u201cunfair trade practices,\u201d which the president has accused all of America\u2019s allies as well as China, it\u2019s largest trading partner, of engaging in.
Many Western leaders share Trump\u2019s concerns about China\u2019s trade practices: There appears to be an emerging consensus that China\u2019s entry into the WTO, which governs trade rules between nations, in 2001 ultimately ended up hurting Western nations. But because Trump has slapped tariffs on European Union nations, threatened Japan and Germany with levies on their car imports to the U. S., and hit Canada with steel and aluminum duties, he has been unable to forge an effective trading coalition to counter China. (Trump also withdrew the United States from the Trans Pacific Partnership, the multilateral Obama-era trade deal that comes into force this year and was seen as a counterweight to China\u2019s trading practices.)
Bush\u2019s approach differed markedly. He played an instrumental role in many of the developments that we now view as historic inevitabilities: the peaceful end of the Cold War, as well as Germany\u2019s reunification and NATO membership. For this, he worked not only with the alliance\u2019s member states, but also with Mikhail Gorbachev, assuring his Soviet counterpart that NATO\u2019s expansion was not a threat to Moscow. (Russia\u2019s current leaders say they believe the West broke its word.)
He also forged a broad military coalition of Western and Arab nations that intervened when Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq invaded Kuwait, scoring what is arguably the last decisive U. S.-led military victory anywhere in the world. The U. S., by that time the lone global superpower, could have achieved any and all of these goals on its own, but Bush engaged America\u2019s allies to build a global coalition.
In some ways, his time in office and Trump\u2019s presence at the G20 are bookends to a specific era of trade. Bush\u2019s biggest legacy\u2014his critics, including Trump, would say liability\u2014was the North American Free Trade Agreement, which created a free-trade zone across Canada, the U. S., and Mexico. Opponents of NAFTA blame it, in part, for the decline of American manufacturing (though automation would have ultimately replaced workers anyway even if NAFTA didn\u2019t exist). Trump was elected, in part, on vowing to rip up the deal. This week, he and the leaders of Canada and Mexico signed a new version of the agreement.
For Trump, trade, and indeed international relations, is a zero-sum game in which one nation\u2019s rise must mean America\u2019s decline. Bush had a different view.
\u201cWe know what works: Freedom works,\u201d he said in his inaugural address in 1989. \u201cWe know what\u2019s right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on Earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state.\u201d<\/p>\n