Daily View: G20 meetings reviewed
Commentators discuss the weekend's G20 meeting in Canada.
if David Cameron was "just a stooge for Obama":
"Obama has enough nasty, real surprises to handle, without ones arising from micro-managed meetings with friendly powers. So why allow Cameron to appear as if he's dictating a new line on Afghanistan - the certainty of troop withdrawals by 2015, the year our next General Election is due?
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"Perhaps because it helps Obama. After winning the presidency, he had announced his hope to bring troops home from Afghanistan in July 2011. He realises this isn't possible any more, but his shift can be presented as the preference of the U.S.'s coalition allies.
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"Might there also be a link with Obama's attacks on BP - or 'British Petroleum' as he called it - over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Cameron was blamed for not tackling Obama firmly enough. Allowing Dave to lead the G8 discussion on Afghanistan could be an olive branch of sorts. What an awful mess."
British Prime Minister before the talks which anticipating the criticism the talks would attract:
"Too often, these international meetings fail to live up to the hype and the promises made. I'm sure other leaders would admit that. A lot of money is spent laying them on. Host cities are disrupted for days or even weeks. The cavalcades roll into town. Good intentions are shared in productive talks. Then, somehow, those intentions rarely seem to come to fruition in real, tangible global action."
the G20 meetings are not worth the money it costs to police them:
"The fact that so much attention has been directed towards the policing is largely due to the lack of anything newsworthy coming out of the summit itself. Even David Cameron, attending for the first time as British prime minister, published his own desperate plea in the Canadian press this week for summits to be turned into something more than the hot air and photo opportunities they have been in the past. (How this relates to his stated intention to take time out to watch the second half of the England v Germany game with Angela Merkel was not made clear.)
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"As an invitation-only club whose membership was literally drawn up on the back of an envelope, the G20 never laid any claim to legitimacy. Now it is also in danger of losing any credibility as a forum for global economic governance. Its failure to address any of the structural problems that caused the financial and economic crises of the past three years has certainly not gone unnoticed in Toronto, let alone its complete refusal to deal with the challenge of climate change.
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"Unbelievably, the G20 is scheduled to hold its next summit in just a few months. If the Canadian experience has taught us anything, it is that such meetings are simply not worth the candle."
[subscription required] that the G20 group deserves its bad press for being inept:
"Reaching agreement was not the main challenge in Toronto this weekend. They knew that was not going to happen. Mainly, they hoped to put the best face they could on disunity.
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"How much do these divisions matter? The main bone of contention in Toronto was fiscal policy. Here, I would argue, simple ineptitude seems to be a bigger problem than disinclination to co-operate.
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"In 2008 and 2009 it was obvious that powerful fiscal and monetary stimulus was necessary everywhere. When everybody wants the same thing, co-operation is easy. How easy? You would have got the same result without it. Last year, co-operation cost nothing and, as compared with the alternative, achieved nothing. In 2010 circumstances have changed. Some countries still have room for fiscal manoeuvre. Others have less and some have none. Co-operation is therefore more difficult - and, you could argue, more necessary."
[registration required] that the big problem concerning the G20 countries is international trade:
"Much of the international mayhem associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s was prompted by competitive currency devaluations, as countries fled the old gold standard and tried to beggar their neighbours. Things are less dramatic now, and those rock-solid foundations do militate against a serious trading bust-up between America and Europe. Nevertheless, there are dangers: first, that progress in liberalising global trade will be even further postponed than it already is; but second, and more serious, that in the absence of transatlantic unity an apparently technical fight over trade, probably over how to deal with environmental rules and taxes, could soon undermine the whole World Trade Organisation system."
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