Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
Just when the G-20 ― which saved the world economy from depression in the wake of the financial crash a decade ago — was coming to be seen as ineffective and useless, it sprang back to relevance last weekend in Hamburg. Absent a crisis moment, it still faces the challenge of proactively advancing the global agenda. But it has proven now to be a bulwark against rolling back globalization and the fight against climate change.
As Fyodor Lukyanov writes from Moscow, this time around the United States and Russia have reversed roles in the 19+1 geometry, with Russia inside the consensus of the world’s major economies and America on the outside. “The biggest economy in this global club, which was created to counter protectionist instincts, now openly proclaims a protectionist course,” he says. “China and Germany, two major targets of U.S. mistrust, reiterated their support for an open global economy. Russia supported the rest of the 19, both in trade and on climate issues, while being unusually constructive vis-à-vis the global agenda.”
“Many Russian commentators,” Lukyanov goes on to report, “have argued that the Hamburg summit marked a watershed moment in global development, when previous divides lost their relevance. Instead of emerging (or re-emerging in the case of Russia) versus developed economies, we are witnessing a growing split between ‘globalists’ and ‘nationalists.’” Lukyanov senses a certain vindication in America’s isolation after decades of gloating at Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Cold War.
After surveying public opinion on the ground in Moscow, Anastasya Manuilova warns against making too much of the first in-person meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the summit. She found naïve hope, but also some skepticism, among ordinary Russians and concludes that one face-to-face encounter alone is unlikely to end the new “Cold War” many there see as having emerged between the two nations.
Whatever Russians might think about the Trump-Putin tête-à-tête, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, sees the declared outcome of “mov[ing] forward” and letting bygones be bygones as “a big mistake.”
“This prescription for improving our bilateral relations implies a false sense of shared ownership for past causes of conflict,” he writes. “That’s wrong. It has been Putin’s actions, not decisions taken by Presidents Barack Obama or George W. Bush, that have contributed directly to the most contentious issues in U.S.-Russia relations today, as well as the tensions between Russia and many of our allies.” He goes on to say that “pledg[ing] to forget about these problems created by Putin lets the Kremlin off the hook without generating any positive outcome for the United States in return. That’s a bad deal for the American people and our allies. In fact, it’s not a deal at all — it’s a perfect gift to Putin.”
Chandran Nair looks beyond the G-20 consensus about globalization and expresses deep doubts that the dominant Western ideas of the past few decades are much of a guide for the future. “Many of the economic development ideas the West believed to be long-held truths and major Western contributions to modernity no longer seem so accurate,” he writes from Hong Kong. In his essay, Nair challenges several myths about development — from the value of the free market and foreign investment to the definition of productivity and the management of large-scale urbanization and climate change.
This week, Donald Trump Jr. released emails that implicate him, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and one of his closest advisers, and Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign manager, as potential players in the Kremlin’s alleged effort to influence last year’s U.S. presidential election. Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the watchdog group Common Cause, writes that the emails are evidence that Trump Jr. broke campaign finance law, under which it is “just as illegal … to solicit a political contribution from a foreign citizen as to accept one.” Ryan’s organization filed a complaint and urged the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate and enforce the law.
Liu Xiaobo, China’s most prominent dissident, died on Thursday after nearly a decade of imprisonment by the Chinese government on sedition charges. As the late Chinese astrophysicist dissident Fang Lizhi wrote when Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, China’s oppression of Liu and many other activists is evidence that democracy is not inevitable with economic progress.
Other highlights from The WorldPost this week:
- To Understand The Trump-Russia Scandal, Follow The Rubles
- The Battle For Mosul Is Coming To An End. Now What?
- The Trial Of One Of Africa’s Most Corrupt Politicians Shows That Fighting Graft Is Global
- FDA Backs Pioneering Gene-Altering Cancer Treatment
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Peter Mellgard is the Features Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels is the Video Editor of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Rosa O’Hara is the Social Editor of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at HuffPost, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s news coverage. Nick Robins-Early and Jesselyn Cook are World Reporters.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as theAdvisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.
