At G20, Biden will look to fill holes left by Putin, Xi
NEW DELHI — President Joe Biden arrived in New Delhi on Friday for a global summit where he will present the United States as an economic and strategic counterweight to China and Russia, taking advantage of the absence of leaders from those two countries, who are skipping the gathering.
Arriving in India on Friday evening, Biden shook hands with Eric Garcetti, the U.S. ambassador to India, before traveling to the residence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a bilateral meeting. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, accompanied the president.
Biden is bringing to India the promise of up to $200 billion in new development funds for climate change, food security, public health and other infrastructure needs in less developed countries through revamped international financing institutions like the World Bank, leveraged by a relatively small investment by the United States.
He and Modi ended their 52-minute meeting — during which they discussed India’s recent moon landing, investments in the Indian technology sector and working together in the Indo-Pacific — by issuing a lengthy joint promise to further deepen a relationship that they said was “based on trust and mutual understanding.”
The initiative represents a U.S.-led response to China’s Belt and Road project providing loans to poorer countries to build ports, rail lines and telecommunications networks, a venture that has expanded Beijing’s influence in parts of the world where it rarely played much of a role before. Biden’s plan would match only a fraction of the Chinese investments in recent years but offers an alternative to Beijing’s presence as an omnipresent and often unforgiving creditor.
The president will have an important opportunity at the Group of 20 meeting thanks to the decisions by President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia to not attend. Biden will have room to present a case to a large group of important world leaders that they should align with the United States on matters that include condemning Russia’s war in Ukraine and curbing China’s increasing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific.
Biden landed in New Delhi on a different political footing than he had less than a year ago at the G20 summit in Bali, when he was bolstered by better-than-expected midterm election results by Democratic candidates and held a highstakes meeting with Xi centered around rebuilding a relationship that was threatening to boil over.