Christ Uhlmann / The Australian Broadcasting Corp. & Abby Zimet / Common Dreams & Lorenzo Marsili, Beppe Caccia / Common Dreams – 2017-07-10 08:00:12
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-09/did-trumps-g20-performance-indicate-us-decline-as-world-power/8691538
G20: Does Donald Trump’s Awkward Performance
Indicate America’s Decline as World Power?
Christ Uhlmann, political editor / The Australian Broadcasting Corp.
(July 9, 2017) — The G20 became the G19 as it ended. On the Paris climate accords the United States was left isolated and friendless. It is, apparently, where this US President wants to be as he seeks to turn his nation inward.
Donald Trump has a particular, and limited, skill-set. He has correctly identified an illness at the heart of the Western democracy. But he has no cure for it and seems to just want to exploit it. He is a character drawn from America’s wild west, a travelling medicine showman selling moonshine remedies that will kill the patient. And this week he underlined he has neither the desire nor the capacity to lead the world.
Given the US was always going to be one out on climate change, a deft American President would have found an issue around which he could rally most of the leaders. He had the perfect vehicle — North Korea’s missile tests.
So, where was the G20 statement condemning North Korea? That would have put pressure on China and Russia? Other leaders expected it and they were prepared to back it but it never came.
There is a tendency among some hopeful souls to confuse the speeches written for Mr. Trump with the thoughts of the man himself. He did make some interesting, scripted, observations in Poland about defending the values of the West. And Mr. Trump is in a unique position — he is the one man who has the power to do something about it.
But it is the unscripted Mr. Trump that is real. A man who barks out bile in 140 characters, who wastes his precious days as President at war with the West’s institutions — like the judiciary, independent government agencies and the free press.
He was an uneasy, awkward figure at this gathering and you got the strong sense some other leaders were trying to find the best way to work around him. Mr. Trump is a man who craves power because it burnishes his celebrity. To be constantly talking and talked about is all that really matters. And there is no value placed on the meaning of words. So what is said one day can be discarded the next.
So, what did we learn this week?
We learned Mr. Trump has pressed fast forward on the decline of the US as a global leader. He managed to diminish his nation and to confuse and alienate his allies. He will cede that power to China and Russia — two authoritarian states that will forge a very different set of rules for the 21st century.
Some will cheer the decline of America, but I think we’ll miss it when it is gone. And that is the biggest threat to the values of the West, which he claims to hold so dear.
An Uneasy, Awkward Travelling Medicine
Showman Whose Remedies Will Kill the Patient
Abby Zimet / Common Dreams
(July 9, 2017) — Cognitive Dissonance 101: Our loser-in-chief celebrated his alleged big boy triumphs at Hamburg’s G20 Summit by releasing an exquisitely tacky, choir-infused, Mel Brooks-like “Make America Great Again” video — see little Donny pretend to be a statesman and shake all those grown-ups’ hands! — and puffing himself up on Twitter (with wow no/nada/zilch sense of irony) for his brilliant idea of setting up “an impenetrable cyber security unit” with BFF Putin.
Typical online response: “Too bad Bin Laden is dead. Trump could partner with him to fight terrorism.” Meanwhile a renowned conservative Australian journalist offered a blistering, plain-spoken account of what the rest of the world saw, and it wasn’t pretty.
The report by Chris Uhlmann, award-winning political editor of the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, noted Trump “was an uneasy, awkward figure at this gathering . . . You got the strong sense some leaders were trying to find the best way to work around him.”
Like a character out of America’s wild west, Uhlmann called Trump “a traveling medicine showman selling moonshine remedies that will kill the patient . . . He has neither the desire nor the capacity to lead the world.”
Never mind his somewhat normal written speeches, Uhlmann warned: “It is the unscripted Mr. Trump that is real. A man who barks out bile in 140 characters, who wastes his precious days as President at war with the West’s institutions — and thus poses “the biggest threat to the values of the West.”
Uhlmann’s commentary quickly went viral, probably both for its savage content and the calm with which it was delivered. Oh yeah, and because it told the truth. US press take note: This is how you do your job.
The G20 Parade of Monsters
Lorenzo Marsili, Beppe Caccia / Common Dreams
(July 6, 2017) — The turn of the century marked the zenith of globalisation and the golden era of G7-G8 summits. One model seemed fit for all: neoliberal economics and democratic politics. One obvious hegemon was in the room: the United States of America. And one clear ambition charted the course ahead: defining a “new world order” supported by the optimistic claim of a prosperity for all.
That picture has blown up. Ten years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, the snapshot that emerges from the Hamburg G20 summit is one of a global disorder where no clear model, no clear hegemon, and no clear ambition prevails.
The failure of the neoliberal model should be evident to all: financial and extractive capitalism has led to increasing inequalities and secular stagnation, decline of the Western middle classes and concentration of wealth on a scale not seen since the belle époque.
In the meantime American hegemony is waning and challenged — from Eastern Europe to the South China Sea; the election of Donald Trump to the White House has led even traditional European allies to question the trans-Atlantic special relationship.
And, finally, global ambition has given way to a cacophony where illiberal democracy brushes sides with authoritarianism, protectionism with free trade, while all the most pressing issues of our time remain unaddressed.
The result is that the international system appears unable to craft a new vision of global governance. “Crisis” seems to be the permanent form of an open transition, generating tensions at every level: from political and economic clashes between declining global powers and ascending regional powers to military tensions unchecked by global policemen.
The G20 process was not meant to represent a simple quantitative extension of the G7 or G8 structure; it was rather born as a qualitative attempt to broaden to emerging countries a degree of co-responsibility in the stabilisation of the global economy. It is no coincidence that the format was first imagined in the aftermath the 1997 Asian financial crisis and it gained in importance following the 2007-8 financial havoc.
But the G20 summit in Hamburg, far from representing the first sprouts of a new, multilateral governance, appears as a genuine clash of world-views. One the one hand a parade of monsters flirting with political nationalism, economic isolation and authoritarianism — from Erdogan to Putin and Trump.
On the other, the remnants of the so-called liberal establishment attempting to relaunch a “business as usual” of flexible accumulation, open markets and technocratic governance — from Macron to Merkel.
Far from addressing a growing list of clearly global problems — from migrations to climate change, from multinational tax evasion to online surveillance — it is inevitable that such disproportions are bound to multiply tensions and conflicts. The path seems to lead to a permanent crisis of the very idea of a possible global governance. This is an open scenario. One where tragedy and catastrophe flit with possibility and renewal.
Holding the banner of such possible renewal, hundreds of thousands of activists will take the street of Hamburg to protest a G20 divided between two bad alternatives: status quo or authoritarianism. If the “no global” movement of the 1990s had the slogan “another world is possible”, the movements gathering to contest the G20 summit have chosen to stress that “the other world is already here”.
The other world is the one made visible by various global waves that in the last months have seen the centrality of women struggles, of migrants and “welcome initiatives” across Europe, of precarious labor and new forms of strike in the digital economy, or again the experiences of right to the city movements, from Barcelona to Zagreb, which in some cases have even stimulated new local government experiences.
The often local scale of this “other world” does not mean it shies away from the necessary reconfiguration of a transnational alternative to the destructive chaos of the G20 summit. Just a month ago, for instance, Barcelona hosted a global summit, fearless cities, bringing together mayors from across the world to commit to joint initiatives to tackle precisely the global challenges that national leadership seems increasingly unable to address.
At the same times, many of the movements and civil society actors represented in Hamburg — from Blockupy to DiEM25, form the trade justice movement to European Alternatives and hundreds more — aim precisely to recuperate that bottom-up, continental counter-power that Europe would badly need today.
Yes, we run the risk of stumbling towards a chaotic world of nationalism and conflict. But today’s crisis of global governance also offers the chance to move beyond a system that never truly worked in the first place.
For anyone with the ambition of constructing a true democratic politics beyond borders, the best ideas aren’t likely to come out of the official G20 Summit but to be found on the streets of Hamburg.
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