President Joe Biden is headed to one of the most momentous Group of 20 summits in years, poised for a landmark meeting with his Chinese counterpart and buoyed by a better-than-expected performance in U.S. midterm elections.
In Bali, Biden will try to seize on the momentum to galvanize global efforts to stabilize the economy, firm up pressure on Russia and reduce tensions with China, with the aim of boosting his authority on the world stage.
But the summit will test whether Biden’s domestic standing translates into global influence, as the president will be forced to confront questions about the G-20 itself —an increasingly fractious gathering of world leaders who often have competing interests. Biden will be measured on how he addresses the challenge from rivals eager to thwart his agenda.
Biden will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping for the first time in-person as president. Xi is also arriving emboldened by domestic political developments — in his case a party congress that enshrined him as China’s leader for at least the next five years while sidelining rivals.
But the dynamics going into that meeting may change after news his Democrats retained control of the U.S. Senate. Biden says he’s “coming in stronger.”
Control of the U.S. House remains unresolved, with more than 20 races still too close to control. But it’s a historic achievement for Biden for his party to even be within striking distance of keeping the majority in the chamber. Midterm U.S. elections usually end with deep losses for the incumbent president’s party.
The G-20’s members also include Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian officials. They are likely to find that their differences make substantive agreement impossible.
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told reporters Saturday that the president doesn’t plan to meet with the Saudi crown prince but that sit-downs with Erdogan or the leaders of Germany, France and Australia are possible.
The list of problems Biden and G-20 leaders will seek to address is long: global financial instability and a looming recession, worldwide hunger exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, growing tensions in Asia, struggling efforts to curb climate change, the lingering economic and social turmoil of the pandemic.
Biden has described the world as facing an inflection point between autocracies and democracies; in Bali, those factions will come face-to-face.
Biden takes a deep personal interest in the G-20 and similar events. The Bali summit is one of four he’ll attend over a seven-day trip, along with the annual U.N. climate summit in Egypt, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Cambodia and an East Asia summit, also in Cambodia.
The U.S. president repeatedly expressed concern from the campaign trail about erosions of democratic governance and the world order, and his insistence that democracies must show they can lead and deliver for their people.
“If I have any genuine expertise, it’s in foreign policy,” he said in one Nov. 1 aside.
Domestic considerations will also be on Biden’s mind. The president seized on the midterms as a vindication of his stewardship of the US and quickly reiterated plans to run in 2024 — though he said a final decision will come next year. But Biden will need to make progress on inflation, his top domestic liability, which has troubled other G-20 economies as well.
U.S. officials have balked at setting plain public targets or expectations for the G-20. Biden will work with fellow leaders on stabilizing the global economy, including on debt relief, U.S. officials said in a briefing on condition of anonymity. The US will be unapologetic in its support for Ukraine and look to head off fallout of the Russian invasion, such as fuel and food scarcity.
“Everybody’s expectations are pretty low,” said Stephanie Segal, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former U.S. Treasury official. “The G-20 this year has really been hijacked by the Russian invasion and the fallout for both energy and food prices in particular, and the need to respond to those crises.”
On the sidelines of the main summit, Biden will co-host an event on spurring global infrastructure, as the U.S. jockeys with China for influence abroad.
The summit also will precede potential implementation of a price cap on Russian oil, a measure the U.S. has negotiated with European allies to try to reduce the supply impact of new EU sanctions on the nation’s crude while still constricting a key source of money for the Kremlin’s war machine.
The cap won’t take center stage in formal talks, but the summit is a crucial venue for Biden to calm concerns on the sidelines — or to invite countries that won’t formally sign on to at least leverage the measure to seek discounts of their own.
Biden will meet for the first time with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. But Biden will not meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who isn’t attending the Indonesia gathering.
The G-20 leaders’ summit is only 14 years old, a concept born of the global recession. Its birth as a response to an economic downturn means the spotlight is particularly intense as financial headwinds again mount worldwide. Sri Lanka’s default this year has raised fears of a wave of similar defaults through emerging market economies, particularly in countries that are not considered low-income.
“The fundamental question going into the G-20 is will there be a functional G-20 after this,” said Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center.
Several analysts say it’s virtually certain that this year’s summit won’t end with a communique — a joint statement co-signed by every participant. The drafting of previous statements has required grueling, all-night negotiations. Instead, analysts expect a summary of the meeting from Indonesia’s government that aggregates the discussion and leaves plain the unbridgeable divides around the table.
“They should be coordinating on debt relief, they should be coordinating on ways to get aid to countries in need,” Lipsky said. “If they can’t do that, they’re really undercutting some of their initial reason for being as an institution.”
