China, Germany pick up leadership baton
‘Vacuum’ left in international trade after Trump embraces protectionism
LONDON — The U.S. traditionally takes point in the search for common approaches to the big global issues of the day at G-20 summits. Not this time.
When world leaders meet in Hamburg on Friday, China and Germany will move in to take over the U.S.’s role.
The two industrial powerhouses of Asia and Europe are being nudged into an informal alliance to pick up the leadership baton that the U.S. is accused of having dropped since President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, according to diplomats and officials from several Group of 20 members.
The situation has crystallized ahead of this year’s annual G-20 meeting, which will be held in Germany’s busiest commercial port. That’s in part because, for the first time since the group’s founding, the U.S. will be represented by a president who embraces protectionism, abandoning decades of American cheerleading for free trade.
A ‘historic best’
As the previous and current hosts, China’s President Xi Jinping and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, would in any case have worked together on the G-20 agenda. Yet three visits to Germany by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to date, the latest just last month, suggest the two nations are aligned on stepping more broadly into a space that the U.S. has, at least temporarily, left vacant under Trump’s presidency.
“China and Germany’s new closeness is something that happened because of the Trump episode,” said Diego Ramiro Guelar, ambassador to Beijing for G-20 member Argentina. “The two most important leaders in the world are President Xi and Chancellor Merkel at the moment.”
Ties between China and Germany have been strengthening for years, driven by common economic interests and unobstructed by the kinds of geopolitical rivalries that were complicating relations between Beijing and Washington long before Trump’s election. Germany needs markets for its high-end industrial machinery and motor vehicles, and China wants them — so much so it bought German robotics company Kuka AG.
Xi will make his second state visit to Germany just before the summit.
“Relations between China and Germany are at their historic best,” said Michael Clauss, Germany’s ambassador to Beijing, in a recent briefing with reporters. “The economic and political dynamic from a German perspective is moving toward the east.”
Climate change stand
The U.S. has “left somewhat of a vacuum” in the region by abandoning the proposed 12-nation TransPacific Partnership freetrade agreement, Clauss said.
The deal sought to build a U.S.-centered free-trade bloc among Pacific Rim countries from Chile to Vietnam, as an alternative to more China-dominated initiatives such as One Belt One Road. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the TPP plans within a day of taking office.
The Trump vacuum is still more evident when it comes to climate change, after he announced last month that he was pulling the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement to slow global warming. The accord was signed by more than 190 countries, including all of the G-20 members.
“There’s a clear recognition of our leaders that German-Chinese leadership is now needed,” said Karsten Sach, Merkel’s main climate-change sherpa for the G-20, speaking at a conference in Berlin on Friday. “Both nations are very strong exporters, and in terms of the technology aspects of fighting climate change, I see very strong cooperation.”