Goodbye old world order? Final G20 summit before Trump inauguration
Description
Will history remember Rio as the swansong gathering of the US-led world order as we now know it? The curtain is coming down on Joe Biden's last G20 summit – his last big global gathering before the return of Donald Trump to the White House. The outgoing US president, who turns 82 on Wednesday, is slightly older than the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; all institutions that evolved on Washington’s watch. The neoliberal rules of the global game are often referred to as the Washington consensus.
But already there are clubs to rival that consensus, including the BRICS, whose most recent summit was in Russia, and bids to bypass the US dollar as the world's currency. Trump himself is a convert to crypto and is vowing to ratchet up tariffs. Are we seeing the end of an era?
Amid foreboding in Rio, we ask about the G20's bid to frontload financing on global poverty and climate change. Can the rest of the world "Trump-proof" common rules to rein in the excesses of globalisation?
United States
