The U.S. was also isolated on climate change at a May summit of the smaller Group of Seven club in Italy, where the final communique split six-to-one on the issue. This time, Trump risks finding himself alone against a united front of European allies, neighbors such as Canada and Mexico, and America’s former Cold War foes on the two biggest summit items.
As the previous and current hosts, China’s President Xi Jinping and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel would in any case have worked together on the G-20 agenda. Yet three visits to Germany by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to date, the latest just last month, suggest the two nations are aligned on stepping more broadly into a space that the U.S. has, at least temporarily, left vacant under Trump’s presidency. [...]
That format for climate change negotiations disappeared with Trump’s election. A new vanguard group comprising Canada, China and the EU met for the first time in May. A bilateral China-Germany working group on climate change met in Berlin last week, when each side jointly re-committed to take “an ambitious” approach to implementing Paris agreement goals, and to press that collective approach in Hamburg. [...]
Merkel is aware of the dangers of allowing China to peel Germany away from the EU, creating a decidedly unequal partnership between countries that have very different political systems and few shared values. Interviewed in this week’s edition of the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Merkel backed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for EU governments to be able to do more to block foreign purchases of important companies.
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