As India assumes the leadership of both the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the G20, Delhi will need to ensure that the concerns of developing nations are not ignored. At the head of two groups with divergent goals, an assertive foreign policy that seeks to shape and steer conversations will help.

India took the presidency of the eight-member SCO in September and will lead the G20 from December.

Preparations have ensured that it’s a busy season on Raisina Hill. Leading these two plurilateral groups will be complex and challenging. The groupings have divergent goals, purposes and memberships even as they all grapple with Covid-19’s disruptive impact on the global economy and conflicts during and after the pandemic. India will need to ensure that the concerns of developing countries are not relegated to the margins by the war in Ukraine.

At the heart of the endeavour lies the challenge of dialogue and conversations with all, even as a subset of like-minded countries invest in frameworks that respond to decadal objectives. ‘Talk to all and work more with some’ will have to be India’s mantra for 2023 as it has a rare opportunity to make two distinct agendas align with its own.

At the SCO, China’s dominant position is inescapable and it overwhelms the preferences and perspectives of others. Here, India and Russia may share a common imperative to balance China and make the organisation focus on a broader policy and development agenda. As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pointed out during the SCO summit last month, now is not the time for war. Moving away from conflict to attend to economic frailties may be beneficial for SCO and less contentious too. Many in the group are uncomfortable with the Russia–Ukraine conflict and would rather see the SCO focus on the development and human challenges the region is saddled with. India will have to reset the playing board skilfully. If China is playing go and Russia is playing roulette, New Delhi will need to play smart chess.

However, the nature of the SCO and its purpose will ensure that politics takes centre-stage. In the recent SCO summit in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, the Indian PM showed the way. Niceties need to be dropped, and hard questions must be posed including on sovereignty, the expansionist tendencies of some countries, including China, and terrorism emanating from Pakistan.

Simultaneously, India must inject its growth imperative around technology, sustainability and green transitions into discussions, and state its concerns over cybersecurity, online malfeasance and white-elephant infrastructure projects, among others. At the SCO, India would do well to initiate debates on these issues, irrespective of the outcomes, and create space for discussions that may not have Beijing’s blessings.

Diplomacy sometimes misconstrues the role of the host country to imply benign or agnostic participation. India, however, must maintain its determination to have an assertive foreign policy that seeks to shape and steer conversations towards the outcomes it desires.

All of this cannot be starkly divergent from India’s G20 agenda. There needs to be a bridge linking what India aims to achieve through the SCO and the G20, although the methods and formulations used in each forum may differ. The G20 requires a different type and style of hosting. India can leverage its experience to communicate with all actors involved and curate conversations that cater to diverse constituencies. ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas and Sabka Prayas’ (inclusive development for all, everyone’s trust and efforts) is an all-encompassing Indian approach that fits the G20.

Here, India will need to ensure that the clouds of war that loom over Europe do not pour down on its presidency. India must make it clear to its Western partners that it will view any attempt to reduce the impact of its G20 presidency seriously. At the same time, New Delhi must make clear to Moscow that steps towards de-escalation of the war in Ukraine are essential from its end.

External factors will inevitably distract the grouping from anything that is discussed within it. The agenda that is engaged with and outcomes delivered at the G20 may be bold (unlikely) or sub-optimal (more probable). Thanks to G20’s structure, global action will always be evolutionary. India’s efforts must draw from Indonesia and deliver to Brazil and then South Africa.

Modi’s reiteration of the importance of ‘democracy, diplomacy and dialogue’ at the SCO summit is a message that the G20 leaders should also remember as they prepare to engage at the upcoming G20 summit in Indonesia and beyond. The G20’s ability to navigate through economic and social crises should not become hostage to regional or bilateral politics.

India must make a clear and robust case to address larger goals in the spirit of cooperation. It must focus precisely on what it wants to achieve from each working group at the G20 and aim to create a legacy and a future-oriented architecture, which will lend continuity to what it incubates.

US President Donald Trump’s suggestion to reporters aboard Air Force One on the weekend that this year’s G7 meeting be expanded to include Russia, India, South Korea and Australia appears to be more than a presidential thought bubble.

The media has reported that Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been consulted over the initiative and is eager to participate.

The obvious interpretation of the US president’s invitation list is that it was designed as a snub to China, which is the major economic power conspicuously not included.

It’s also an affront to the G20, which describes itself as ‘the premier forum for international economic cooperation’ and includes all of Trump’s invitees, plus China and the six most significant emerging economies.

As host of this year’s G7 meeting, Trump can invite whomever he wants. Last year’s host, French President Emmanuel Macron, invited both Morrison and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to his G7 summit in Biarritz.

However, Trump’s comments appeared to imply a permanent expansion to the G7, which he said was a ‘very outdated group of countries’, adding that he didn’t think it ‘properly represents what’s going on in the world’. He suggested it should be a G10 or G11.

Expanding the G7’s membership was considered in late 2008 and early 2009 as its members grappled with coordinating a global response to the financial crisis. France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi were adamant that the G20, which had been established as a finance ministers’ forum in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, was not up to the job.

They urged a G14 or G15 that would include Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa and South Korea, but not Australia. The G20 also included Argentina, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which were smaller economies but were important for the global financial system.

Furious lobbying by then prime minister Kevin Rudd, particularly of US President George W. Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, won the day for the G20. It was elevated to a leaders’ forum, with Rudd arguing that, alongside the other emerging nations, China would be more responsible and accountable than would be the case if its membership were simply tacked on to an essentially Atlantic institution.

The G20’s achievements during the financial crisis can be overstated: countries broadly pursued their own interests rather than the common global good in stimulating their economies, and their promises to eschew the protectionism that had deepened the 1930s depression were widely disregarded.

Since the crisis, the most ambitious attempt to use the G20 to stimulate the global economy came with Australia’s chairmanship in 2014 when members committed to structural reforms to boost economic growth. Again, the promises weren’t kept and monitoring of their performance was ultimately abandoned.

A virtual meeting of G20 leaders in March promised to ‘do whatever it takes’ to respond to the Covid-19 crisis but failed to include any concrete steps.

A meeting of G20 finance ministers held alongside the International Monetary Fund/World Bank meetings in April suspended US$11 billion in sovereign debt repayments for the poorest countries through to the end of this year, but there was criticism that this fell short of what was needed.

That agreement included China offering debt relief for the first time. China has also donated to an IMF-sponsored US$17 billion increase in the fund’s poverty relief and growth trust, which has also won support from Japan, the UK, France, Spain, Canada and Australia, although not the United States.

Perhaps the major contribution of G20 summits has been to provide an opportunity for meetings of major leaders on the sidelines that have brokered deals on issues of significance, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s initiative at the 2012 Mexico summit on Syria’s chemical weapons that forestalled military action by US President Barack Obama. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping used the G20 summits in Buenos Aires in 2017 and in Osaka last year to broker temporary truces in their trade war.

In an election year, the Trump administration has no desire for truces and is only interested in international summits to pursue its agenda against China.

A virtual meeting of G7 foreign ministers held alongside the G20 summit in March concluded without a statement because US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to sign anything that didn’t refer to the ‘Wuhan virus’, while a meeting of G20 health ministers in April broke down due to bickering between the US and China over the World Health Organization.

It’s far from certain that this year’s G7 meeting will take place. It was originally scheduled for this month, but Trump wanted a physical meeting, not a video link, and decided to postpone it after Merkel said she wouldn’t fly to the US. He said at the weekend it could be held in September but may also be postponed until after the US election on 3 November. The G20 summit is scheduled for 21 November in the Saudi capital Riyadh.

It’s likely that the European G7 members, France, Germany and Italy, would oppose Trump’s proposed expansion of its permanent membership, notwithstanding their stance in 2008–09, as they don’t share the US desire to isolate China and would see the expansion as diluting European influence. England and Canada have already declared their opposition to Trump’s proposed invitation to Russia to rejoin the group, from which it was expelled in 2014 following its annexation of Crimea.

It may be that a great era of summiteering, which was closely linked to globalisation, is drawing to a close. Australia had a hand in the formation of APEC in 1989 and its elevation as an annual leaders’ summit from 1993. As well as its role in cementing the G20 as a leaders’ summit in 2009, Australia, under Rudd, was also instrumental in expanding the East Asia Summit to include the leaders of Russia and the US in 2011, to ensure there was a forum for all major powers with a stake in Asia’s future to come together.

Trump skipped the 2018 APEC summit and last year’s meeting was cancelled due to unrest in the host country, Chile. He has not attended East Asia Summit meetings and may now be cooling on the G20. There’s no shared vision on the future composition or mission of the G7.

As a geographically isolated nation with a small population and economy, Australia’s national interest has always been served by the strengthening of global institutions that facilitate dialogue and the setting of rules for international commerce.

Australia will always be the loser in a world where the exercise of power becomes the dominant medium for international relations.

At the weekend’s G20 meeting in Osaka, US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, agreed that their countries would resume economic and trade negotiations.

Trump also said US companies could resume sales to Huawei. As he put it: ‘[W]e sell to Huawei a tremendous amount of product that goes into the various things that they make. And I said that that’s okay, that we will keep selling that product. These are American companies, John, that make product. And that’s very complex, by the way. Highly scientific.’

This comes from two things. First, US companies that supply Huawei—like chipmakers Qualcomm, Intel and Broadcom—don’t want to lose revenue. As Trump said, we’re talking about ‘a tremendous amount of money’ and US companies were ‘very upset’ about a loss of sales.

The second reason flows from Xi’s line that the US must respect the Chinese state’s ‘core interests’ in any negotiations. Huawei qualifies here. It’s a core element of Xi’s drive for global strategic and technological dominance, and the company was obviously hurting more from the US freeze than its bullish media statements indicated.

But the Huawei issue is parked, not resolved. The company remains on the Commerce Department’s entity list, so it’s about granting licences to US firms where the sale of their products is no threat to national security. Trump also said he wants to see ‘where we end up’ before entering any discussion on Huawei with Xi, noting that ‘we have a national security problem, which to me is paramount’.

In return, it seems Xi has promised that Chinese companies will buy more US farm products, starting soon and not waiting for a larger US–China deal—a savvy move that plays to Trump’s base and ego.

What this tells us is that the big outcome Trump seeks from Beijing is cash—for farmers and US companies. In his words again: ‘Buying American product is very important to me. It’s a big—it’s a big thing.’ He mentions national security, but his brain is focused on the dollars, his base and probably the 2020 election.

For now, then, we have a ‘deal’ for resuming talks that trades US relaxation of pressure on China’s tech sector for Beijing forcing Chinese companies to buy more US farm produce (and presumably less from other suppliers—like Australian farmers).

If that were to be a harbinger of any final deal Trump strikes with Xi, then you’d have to wonder why he bothered with confrontation, because the future of US strategic and economic power is not soybeans, but technology.

It’s not just Huawei that has been parked until later. The deep disconnect yet to be bridged is the one on trade between Trump’s ‘gut’ and the views of his key advisers. The assessment of much of Congress and corporate America is that the US is in deep strategic, economic and technological competition with the Chinese state.

It’s possible that months from now Trump will sign a very big, very great, beautiful deal that only he could have made, but that makes no progress on changes to the fundamental structural policies and practices of Xi’s party-state.

If that happened, stock markets around the world would probably get a bounce, and other G20 leaders would congratulate Xi and Trump for listening to their calls to not harm broader global economics with their bilateral troubles. It’d be a dead cat bounce though, because if Xi’s signature policies like ‘Made in China 2025’ persist, then Trump, or any other US president, will find themselves back where Trump started, but with less credibility in taking on Xi a second time.

Beyond the art of the deal, a deeper disconnect was on display in Osaka. This one has to do with the World Trade Organization’s future. Reform was on the agenda. Again, the root cause of the need for reform lies in longstanding policies and practices of the Chinese state, accelerated by Xi who sensed China’s moment when he became president.

At its most basic, the WTO problem is that China joined the organisation in late 2001 as a developing economy and has taken single-minded advantage of this as its economy has changed.

Back in September 2001, the Chinese leadership ‘agreed to undertake a series of important commitments to open and liberalize its regime in order to better integrate in the world economy and offer a more predictable environment for trade and foreign investment in accordance with WTO rules.’ That didn’t happen.

Instead, the Chinese state used the preferential rules for developing countries and ruthlessly slow-rolled and distorted moves to liberalise and open key sectors of its economy. Huawei and other Chinese ‘national champions’ rose and operate now through these distortions.

Russia and China aside, almost every G20 country agrees that WTO reform must address these practices and recognise that China, despite major social inequality, now exhibits the features of a developed economy.

The most the G20 can agree to is reaffirming ‘support for the necessary reform of the World Trade Organization to improve its functions’. There’s no timeframe and no agreement on what those reforms should be.

On the tech sector, which is heartland stuff for US and Chinese competition, the multilateral news is worse.

Some choice bits from the G20 leaders’ communiqué have a distinct post-modern flavour:

To further promote innovation in the digital economy, we support the sharing of good practices on effective policy and regulatory approaches and frameworks that are innovative as well as agile, flexible, and adapted to the digital era, including through the use of regulatory sandboxes … We affirm the importance of protection of intellectual property. Along with the rapid expansion of emerging technologies including the Internet of Things (IoT), the value of an ongoing discussion on security in the digital economy is growing.

Agile ‘regulatory sandboxes’ and an ‘ongoing discussion’ aren’t phrases that inspire much confidence.

The Osaka summit shows that for multilateralism to work, someone still needs to drive the agenda. So far, no leader is stepping forward with any vision beyond calming the markets, urging the US and China to ‘resolve their trade dispute’, and saying that Trump and Xi understand the merits of this for everyone. Their arm-wrestle affects everyone, but it’s not about everyone. It’s about their own power and roles in the world.

In a pre-G20 speech, Prime Minister Scott Morrison came closest to the core issues when he said, ‘It is now evident that the US believes that the rule-based trading system—in its current form—is not capable of dealing with China’s economic structure and policy practices.’ He added that the ‘current trading system seems incapable of acknowledging, let alone resolving, these issues’.

It’s a good diagnosis, but it’s no prescription. And there’s no mention of the key ingredient: sustained international pressure leading to verifiable policy and behavioural changes in Beijing.

Of course, any such agenda will be very uncomfortable for Beijing, and G20 members will need to make a concerted effort to shift China’s ways.

Sadly, it seems that our best hope for resolving the core international distortions and problems resulting from Xi Jinping’s drive for global power is Donald Trump.

This year’s G20 summit in Hamburg promises to be among the more interesting in recent years. For one thing, US President Donald Trump, who treats multilateralism and international cooperation with cherished disdain, will be attending for the first time.

Trump comes to Hamburg having already walked out of one of the key commitments from last year’s summit—to join the Paris climate agreement ‘as soon as possible’. And he will not have much enthusiasm for these meetings’ habitual exhortation to forswear protectionism or provide greater assistance to refugees.

Moreover, the Hamburg summit follows two G20 annual meetings in authoritarian countries—Turkey in 2015 and China in 2016—where protests could be stifled. This year’s summit promises to be an occasion for raucous street demonstrations, directed against not only Trump, but also Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

The G20 has its origins in two ideas, one relevant and important, the other false and distracting. The relevant and important idea is that developing and emerging market economies such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and China have become too significant to be excluded from discussions about global governance. While the G7 has not been replaced—its last summit was held in May in Sicily—G20 meetings are an occasion to expand and broaden the dialogue.

The G20 was created in 1999, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. Developed countries initially treated it as an outreach forum, where they would help developing economies raise financial and monetary management to the developed world’s standards. Over time, developing countries found their own voice and have played a larger role in crafting the group’s agenda. In any case, the 2008 global financial crisis emanating from the United States, and the subsequent eurozone debacle, made a mockery of the idea that developed countries had much useful knowledge to impart on these matters.

The second, less useful idea underpinning the G20 is that solving the pressing problems of the world economy requires ever more intense cooperation and coordination at the global level. The analogy frequently invoked is that the world economy is a ‘global commons’: either all countries do their share to contribute to its upkeep, or they will all suffer the consequences.

This rings true and certainly applies to some areas. Addressing climate change, to take a key problem, does indeed require collective action. Cutting carbon dioxide emissions is a true global public good, because every country, left to its own devices, would rather free ride on others’ cuts while doing very little at home.

Similarly, infectious diseases that travel across borders require global investments in early-warning systems, monitoring, and prevention. Here, too, individual countries have little incentive to contribute to those investments and every incentive for free riding on others’ contributions.

It is a small step from such arguments to consider the G20’s bread-and-butter economic issues—financial stability, macroeconomic management, trade policies, structural reform—in the same vein. But the global-commons logic largely breaks down with such economic problems.

Consider the topic that will be on all G20 leaders’ minds in Hamburg (except for Trump’s, of course): the threat of rising trade protectionism. A new report from Global Trade Alert warns that the G20 has failed to live up to its previous pledges on this issue. So far, Trump’s bark has been worse than his bite on trade. Nonetheless, the report argues, the thousands of protectionist measures that still impede US exports in other countries may well give Trump the excuse he needs to increase barriers of his own.

Yet the failure to maintain open trade policies is not really a failure of global cooperation or a result of insufficient global spirit. It is essentially a failure of domestic policy.

When we economists teach the principle of comparative advantage and the gains from trade, we explain that free trade expands the home country’s economic pie. We trade not to confer benefits on other countries, but to enhance our own citizens’ economic opportunities. Responding to other countries’ protectionism by erecting barriers of our own amounts to shooting ourselves in the foot.

True, trade agreements have not brought benefits to a large number of Americans; many workers and communities have been hurt. But the skewed and unbalanced trade deals that produced these results were not imposed on the US by other countries. They were what powerful US corporate and financial interests—the same ones that support Trump—demanded and managed to obtain. The failure to compensate the losers was not the result of inadequate global cooperation, either; it was a deliberate domestic policy choice.

The same goes for financial regulation, macroeconomic stability or growth-promoting structural reforms. When governments misbehave in these areas, they may produce adverse spillovers for other countries. But it is their own citizens who pay the greatest price. Exhortations at G20 summits will not fix any of these problems. If we want to avoid misguided protectionism, or to benefit from better economic management in general, we need to start by putting our own national houses in order.

Worse still, the knee-jerk globalism that suffuses G20 meetings feeds into the populists’ narrative. It provides justification for Trump and like-minded leaders to deflect attention from their own policies and lay the blame on others. It is because other countries break the rules and take advantage of us, they can say, that our people suffer. Globalism-as-solution is easily transformed into globalism-as-scapegoat.

The reality, as a latter-day Caesar might put it, is that the fault is not in our trade partners, but in ourselves.

Summit season blossoms. Behold the annual display of the shift of Australian international policy—in symbolism and substance—to the personal care of the Prime Minister.

The structure and style of the way Australia does foreign policy at the top has been remade over 25 years. The PM’s role is at the centre of the change. No longer just presiding in Cabinet, the PM flies off to do the presidential lifting and carrying.

Summit season matters in the power and politics of Canberra. The season reflects and magnifies the presidential prerogatives grafted onto the prime ministership. This column has ruminated on the way the system has been cycling through PMs in double quick time.

The presidential pretensions can create headstrong captains making too many captain’s calls. Malcolm Bligh Turnbull understands deeply the danger of being Captain Bligh. As both the Labor and Liberal parties have shown, it takes only one caucus meeting to bring down an Oz president.

For all the benefits it offers, summit season is part of that presidential syndrome. Consider the negative impacts on some of our presidents after looking at the remaking of our foreign policy apparatus.

For the first 90 years of the Commonwealth, the PM’s task was to tend to the big bilaterals and the core alliance relationship. The PM still does the bilats, but now must service and exploit a set of new multilateral mechanisms. And do it face to face.

The arrival of the jet plane offered the means; and come the end of the Cold War, a rolling set of opportunities to create new institutions closer to Australia’s abiding interests. A quick stroll through the PMs tells the story.

For Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke, the big multilateral was the Commonwealth summit every two years. The one thing these blokes had to differentiate their calendar from that of Menzies was the chance to go to the annual South Pacific Forum. Like Menzies, they could sometimes time a pilgrimage to Washington to call by the UN General Assembly. And that was it.

Keating began the construction with his role in achieving the APEC summit. With huge amounts of pushing by Downer and Foreign Affairs, Howard achieved a big win for Australia by getting a seat at the East Asia Summit. Then Rudd helped to create the G20 Summit.

For Australia’s leader the annual opportunities—and the demands—had been transformed.

Malcolm Turnbull inherits the right to revel in the summit season’s rare air. Breathe deep at the bilateral summits and clamber atop the mountain ranges of the multilaterals.

The countdown on the crowded calendar to Christmas has commenced.

Turnbull Bilats: New Zealand, Indonesia, Germany, Japan.

Turnbull Multilats: G20 in Turkey, APEC in the Philippines, East Asia Summit in Malaysia, Commonwealth summit in Malta and the Paris climate change conference.

The recent rousing nature of Oz politics and the repeated presidential regicide has had an impact on the opportunity to do personal relations at the summit. The roll call of Australians at the G20 since 2009 reads: Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan, Julia Gillard (twice), Bob Carr, Tony Abbott, and now Malcolm Turnbull.

The summit season has had a part in recent Oz politics, and not always in a good way. There were myriad domestic reasons why Kevin Rudd’s dream run as a new PM soured so dramatically.

The key international turning point is the snowbound failure of the climate change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. An exhausted Rudd fumed about being ‘ratfucked’ by China in trying to get a deal on what he’d told Australians was ‘the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time.’ Climate change certainly played a role in unmaking the first leadership terms of both Rudd and Turnbull.

The self-serving Gillard version is that after Copenhagen Rudd fell into a prolonged mental funk and his leadership wobbles became a plummet to the regicide in June 2010.

The sleep debt and travel exhaustion of summit season is a little-noted impost on the travelling PM. The tyranny of distance and time zones still matters.

As Turnbull breathes in the summit atmosphere, he might reflect that it’s the season when leaders size up their peers. Leaders matter and summits are where they matter to each other.

Barack Obama didn’t rate Tony Abbott, as was dramatically illustrated by the bird that the US President flipped his Australian host with that speech at the University of Queensland scorching Australia over climate policy.

Obama privately dismissed Abbott as a guy who didn’t get it. The US President talked up the extraordinary alliance and gave Abbott his obligatory Washington visit.

Yet one of the side stories of the Abbott years is how Australia’s access at all levels in the White House froze or fell. (Suddenly we had new sympathy for the Canadian troubles in Washington).

A small benefit of the summit season will be the chance for a quick reset with Obama as he zooms towards his final laps.

Turnbull will draw political benefits from the summits, not to mention policy opportunities. But prolonged, repeated exposure at summit altitudes can affect thinking, even of the most pragmatic.

John Howard said he was considering retiring as PM at the end of 2006 (Peter Costello scorned this claim; John Hewson always said Howard would only go out in a box). Still it was considered and such an orderly transition would have changed much in the political history that followed. Howard would have done a Menzies, the rare leader picking his exit point.

Why didn’t Howard go in 2006? John Howard is ever John Howard and, at least, he won’t die wondering.

One reason he stayed—perhaps a bigger factor than it should have been—was that Janette and John (stress Janette and John) would host the APEC summit in Sydney in September, 2007. Two months later in the federal election, Howard lost his seat and his government. Ah, the rare air of summit season.