By Jide Osuntokun
Welcome back to the Club” was how Immanuel Macron the president of France greeted President Joe Biden at the recent G7 summit that held in Cornwall England. This was the first major outing of President Biden since becoming the president of the USA in January following the tumultuous and unpredictable years of President Donald J. Trump. The G7 is an informal group of the most industrially advanced liberal democracies in the world consisting of the USA, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy. After the collapse of communist Soviet Union, the Russian Federation was brought in to make it the G8 but rapprochement with Russia did not last long before it was kicked out because of Russia’s aggressive behavior in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and in the Baltic and generally its involvement in meddling in democratic elections in the West.
This particular meeting is the first meeting when the leaders of the G7 met in person since the last meeting in Quebec Canada in 2019 when President Trump had a public spat with the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the host of the G7 leaders and called the leader of an important neighbor a liar. Trump also refused to sign the joint communiqué after the summit. The Cornwall summit lacked the anxieties and drama of the Trumpian era in American foreign policy. Biden’s inaugural speech in January promised to return the United States to the driving seat of global diplomacy. He seems to have achieved this already. First he joined the Paris Protocol to protect the global climate. He then raised the issue of returning to the nuclear agreement with Iran, the so called P5 + 1 in which the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany entered into a complex agreement with Iran to prevent the Islamic Republic from refining uranium to nuclear bomb grade level. Negotiations about this are ongoing in Vienna. The virtual adoption of Biden’s “build back better” which was his mantra during his election campaign showed how dominant the American influence in the G7 is.
The members also embraced the idea of rapidly moving to a green future of possibly zero green gas emissions to meet the target of not more than 1.5 degrees rise in global temperature. In the final communiqué of the Cornwall summit, the criticism of China and Russia is from the Biden’s policy book so to say. There was a promise of $650 billion loan to the IMF for lending to poor countries to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. President Biden promised to donate to the WHO for onward distribution to the poor countries 500 million shots of the coronavirus vaccines. The British added 100 million of their own while Japan promised to donate 30 million shots and the European Union promised to round it up to one billion. The WHO however said it needs 11 billion rather than one billion shots. This Is presumably why the G7 promised to loan $650 billion to the IMF to assist poor countries to buy Covid vaccines.
Whatever may be the shortcomings of the G7, one cannot blame it for inaction provided it carries out its promises and commitment. The other vaccines producing countries like China, India and Russia can pitch in and add their own donations. The solution really is to share the technical and scientific know-how of vaccines production with countries that can produce them. This is the position of South Africa, South Korea, India and presumably Australia. But it appears the British, the Germans and the Americans do not want to breach copyright laws and traditions of their countries. Such a breach, it was argued, can discourage innovation and pharmaceutical research. There was also an agreement on corporate taxes among the G7 so as to have a level playing field to eliminate some countries being disadvantaged by very low taxes by their competitors to attract investors.
One item on the communiqué that attracted my attention is the commitment of the G7 to match China’s spending on the so-called “new Silk Road “and transportation grid all over the world that is allegedly giving the Chinese an advantage over their western competitors. Certainly, Nigeria can benefit from the oncoming competition between China and the West to assist us in improving our transportation grid. If the G7 manages to carry out their green commitment, countries like Nigeria had better be prepared for a hard time of not finding market for their hydrocarbons. The G7 invited South Africa, South Korea, India and Australia to observe the summit negotiations. For us in Nigeria, the irrelevance of our country fighting over cows route is made very clear. We have never had it so bad.
The point needs to be made that the G7 is an informal club whose secretariat is ad hoc moving from one summit to the next hosting country. There is no certainty that these commitments will be met and there are no sanctions to enforce the commitments entered into by the members. One issue that has attracted me is the strident name-calling of China and Russia by Biden who is also trying to dragoon their western allies to their Chinese confrontation. The American president has also carried his strident campaign to the NATO summit which met immediately after the G7 meeting.
I wonder what Joe Biden is about in his country’s relations with China and Russia. It is clear that America sees China as a competitor for global influence. America is right to feel the challenge of China especially with the phenomenal growth of Chinese economy even during this coronavirus pandemic that was unleashed on the world from Wuhan, China. It is amazing that China somehow seemed to have overcome the effect of the plague with few mortality compared with over 600,000 souls in America alone and millions in the West. The problem Biden is going to have to contend with is that some countries in Europe are somehow dependent on the Chinese market and Chinese investment. Germany for example has China as its biggest market overseas. It follows therefore that the Europeans will hedge their bet on anti-Chinese criticism. As for Russia, the Europeans share same continent with the Russians. America is far away and the Europeans in spite of the NATO shield feel they need to have an independent power of their own to serve as a deterrent against Russian conventional and Strategic forces. They are also concerned about American unreliability which manifested itself during the Trump administration when Trump said he did not believe in Article 5 which says an attack on any NATO member is an attack on all. This sentiment is very strong in France and has always been there since the time of General Charles de Gaulle and France’s development of its force de frappe as its own nuclear deterrence separate from that of the United States. Biden will do whatever is necessary to convince American allies that no matter who is president in the USA, NATO is a critical component of American Defence and foreign policies. This he feels is critical at a time when Vladimir Putin is determined to put Russia back as co-equal of America in global power.
Biden seems to play open diplomacy. He has made everyone to know what he was going to demand of Russia and China even before meeting their leaders. This is not the tradition of European diplomacy which is not always open. After the First World War which was blamed on secret diplomacy, America under President Woodrow Wilson championed the idea of “open covenants” and was supported by the Left particularly in Britain which favored “democratic control” of foreign policy. This idea of “open covenants” was included in one of the Articles of the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations. But since then the world has reverted to secret diplomacy but it seems Biden represents the extreme example of open diplomacy.
One wonders whether it makes sense for America to challenge China and Russia at the same time. This has succeeded in driving Russia into the warm embrace of China. Although China and Russia share a common sometimes disputed borders, where there had been fighting in the past, they are being forced to come together because of their common challenge of American belligerent posture against them. Apart from Russian opposition to NATO extending to its borders and the competition in the Arctic Circle, there are no fundamental reasons why Russia and the USA cannot establish a modus vivendi between these two nuclear weapons states. Russia is no longer an ideological opponent of the USA as it used to be when Soviet Union was a communist state involved in global struggle for ideological domination between Washington DC and Moscow. At least superficially Russia is a democracy of the autocratic type. The West will also have to understand Putin’s obsession with his idea of Russia taking care of “Russia abroad”. He must be encouraged to bring his country into the wider world rather than keeping him at arm’s length while the ordinary Russians suffer the consequences of western hostility to their country. This was why I saw some reason in Trump’s warmth to Russia. I honestly don’t see how Russia will kowtow to America unless America was prepared to engage it in physical combat. Instead of the stridency of Biden, it will be wise for America to engage Russia so that the mutual confrontation manifesting in cyber warfare can end.
As for China and America, the competition between them is inevitable. It is one between an economically dominant country now in decline and a rising Eastern power with all the underlying racist undertones. China is also not particularly popular in Asia despite the showering of billions on loans and grants to countries in South Asia and countries on the Pacific Rim. Recently, America was able to put together a five -country liberal democratic alliance of Australia, India, South Korea, Japan and the USA to try and rein in Chinese aggression in Asia. And most of the ASEAN counties are also suspicious of Chinese intentions. This gives America the chance for diplomacy to contain China. The good thing is that the Chinese and American economies are intertwined with the Chinese holding trillions of United States dollar bonds while the Chinese economy depends on accessibility to American and western markets. In this struggle, both China and America are likely to try to enlist the support of other countries especially African countries. The world seems to be going back to the old days of diplomatic struggle to seek for support in the rest of the world. We seem to be back to the past when non-alignment became the wisest policy for the so-called third world. It is a case of plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose?
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