Will history remember Rio as the swansong gathering of the US-led world order as we now know it?
The curtain coming down on Joe Biden’s last G20 summit, his last big global gathering before the return of Donald Trump to the White House. The outgoing US president who turns 82 on Wednesday is slightly older than the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, all institutions that evolved on Washington’s watch. The neoliberal rules of the global game are often referred to as the Washington consensus: Washington which hosted the first G20 summit to find common response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Already there are clubs to rival that consensus, including the Brics whose most recent summit was in Russia, and bids to bypass the US dollar as the world’s currency. Trump himself is a convert to crypto and vows to ratchet up tariffs. The end of an era?
There’s foreboding in Rio: We will ask about the G20’s bids to frontload financing on global poverty and climate change. Can the rest of the world ‘Trump proof’ common rules to rein in the excesses of globalization? The answer after January 20th.
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