US President Donald J. Trump will not only attend the G20 meetings but also host meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Argentine President Mauricio Macri, South Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yeon, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Additionally, Trump is expected to hold a signing ceremony for the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts before the summit.
‘Better no meeting than a bad one,’ says the Atlantic Council’s Daniel Fried
Hours after the Kremlin confirmed a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald J. Trump on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires on December 1, the US president cancelled the appointment with his Russian counterpart citing the continued detention of Ukrainian naval vessels and their crew by Russia.“Better no meeting than a bad one,” said Daniel Fried, a distinguished fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Future Europe Initiative and Eurasia Center.
Fried was referring to the last Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July.
The meeting will take place against a backdrop of sharp trade acrimony that has been marked by tit-for-tat trade tariffs. The Trump administration, for now, plans to raise existing tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent on January 1, 2019. Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on an additional $267 billion of Chinese goods.
G20 leaders will meet in Argentina on November 30 and December 1.
Robert A. Manning, a resident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, will be keeping an eye on the Trump-Xi meeting. Here’s what he expects.
Russia did not embark on that military adventure simply to occupy Georgian territories. It had a more important strategic goal in mind—to prevent an eastern enlargement of NATO. Russian President Vladimir Putin calculated, correctly as it turned out, that the Russian commitment to keep Georgia out of NATO was much greater than the Western commitment to Georgia’s security.
Daniel Fried, a distinguished fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Future Europe Initiative and the Eurasia Center, said: “A meeting would make sense if, but only if, Trump is willing to send the right message to Putin, and the president’s track record doesn’t lead to confidence.”
Anders Åslund, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, flatly said a Trump-Putin meeting was a terrible idea.
“I think we have to take a look at, seriously, whether or not the UK is allowed to trade, because, you know, right now, if you look at the deal, they [the UK] may not be able to trade with us,” Trump told reporters on November 26.
May rejected Trump’s characterization, saying: “We will have the ability, outside the European Union, to make those decisions on trade policy for ourselves. It will no longer be a decision being taken by Brussels.”
Brexit supporters had touted the ability to conduct an independent trade policy with non-EU countries as one of the main advantages of the UK leaving the EU.
It is hard to understate the importance of this milestone in the Brexit process. The 585-page draft agreement comprehensively dictates the terms of the UK’s exit from the EU on a broad range of issues, from the UK’s financial obligations toward the EU, the Northern Ireland border regime, citizens’ rights, jurisdiction delimitation, and financial services regulation among others.
