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Outside In | ‘Trump-proofing’ is distracting the world from far graver challenges
From G20 and Apec to the WTO and Nato, global cooperation on climate, security and open trade and investment must be quickly restored
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Why you can trust SCMP
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Over the past week, four of the world’s more important multilateral institutions – and hundreds of world leaders – have been working hard to foster international cooperation. Pity most of their work is likely to be in vain.
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Instead of focusing on the looming challenges – from slowing climate change and agreeing on finance for poor countries that are immediately threatened, to reforming global institutions and settling wars in Ukraine and the Middle East – leaders have been diverted by how to “Trump-proof” their economies.
In Baku in Azerbaijan, thousands of leaders and officials at Cop29, the UN climate change conference, are wrestling with the challenge of slowing global warming and finding the trillions of dollars needed to protect poor, climate-vulnerable countries. But they must surely know they are spitting in the wind. The financing commitments they seek are unlikely to be worth the paper they are written on.
Donald Trump, who has dismissed the climate crisis as a Chinese hoax, is far likelier to withdraw America again from the 2015 Paris Agreement and divert investment to boosting the US oil and gas industry than he is to sign multibillion-dollar cheques to help poor economies deal with climate loss and damage.
And it is not just Trump who cannot be trusted. As Harvard professor Dani Rodrik notes: “The US and other major economies are woefully ill-disposed to provide the public goods the world economy really needs; and given the mood in their capitals these days, their disposition is unlikely to improve any time soon.”
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In Lima, Peru, US President Joe Biden meets Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Apec summit as the lamest of lame ducks. (Is there not deep irony that Barack Obama flew into the 2016 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit – also in Lima – as a lame duck days after Trump first won the presidential election?)
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