The real protagonist will be missing from the next two world summits – Pierre Haski

What can diplomacy do when everything goes wrong? It can do its part, of course, but organizing international summits is not enough to solve the profound and structural problems of our time.

We will have proof of this in the coming days, with two important events: the G20 summit, the group of the twenty main economies of the planet which will meet on Saturday 30 October and Sunday 31 in Rome, and then the COP26, scheduled for October 31 in Glasgow . In Rome the economic and above all geopolitical tensions of the moment will emerge, while in Glasgow we will naturally talk about the climate, an increasingly urgent problem.

Normally one would expect that the two appointments, planned for some time, offer the opportunity to make decisive progress: on the Sino-American tensions that are taking a dangerous turn in the Taiwan Strait, on the arms race or on global warming six years after the Paris agreements, whose commitments were met by hardly anyone.

But for diplomacy to work, all the protagonists must be present, and the two leaders in question will be characterized by an absence of weight: that of the Chinese number one Xi Jinping, while his American counterpart Joe Biden will not be missing.

Xi has not left China for almost two years, that is, since the beginning of the pandemic. His absence has begun to be noticed in recent months, when international summits have gradually resumed in attendance, but without the participation of the Chinese leader.

Is this an excess of prudence on the part of a country with 1.4 billion inhabitants that continues to cling to the “zero covid” strategy and will remain closed for months? Or is it just a medical pretext in a context of “political rectification” on the internal front and of increasingly bitter confrontation with the United States on the external one?

The fact is that Xi will be missing both in Rome and in Glasgow, and the dynamics of the discussions will inevitably suffer. First of all, there will be no bilateral meetings possible in this kind of international events (Xi and Biden have not yet seen each other after the election of the US president, over a year ago), a decisive tool for easing tensions and overcoming obstacles. When the “boss” is absent, on the other hand, the delegations can only lose flexibility.

Today’s world is experiencing a crisis of confidence that results in the paralysis of multilateral organizations such as the United Nations. On an issue such as climate it could be hoped that ideological differences or national rivalries will be put aside for the common interest in “saving the planet”, as in Paris in 2015.

But today this does not happen. Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate that the global trajectory does not allow warming to be sufficiently slowed down. UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres spoke on October 26 in London of an “absolute failure” of states to respect the Paris agreements, criticizing the fact that commitments have been made for 2050 and 2060 without explaining how they will be respected.

Is it possible to collaborate on the climate when we clash over everything else? Europeans would like to believe this, but the widespread mistrust at the international level also has a great weight on the issues that theoretically should generate a consensus. The absence of Xi Jinping will be the most obvious symbol of this impasse, and a bad omen for the appointments of the future.

(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)