G20 Meeting in Bali, Indonesia
U.S. Fails to Impose Its Agenda at G20
The 2022 G20 summit was held on November 15-16 in Bali, Indonesia under the theme "Recover Together, Recover Stronger." It was the 17th meeting of the G20, the world's biggest economies, whose members currently are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. Ten additional countries including Spain, the Netherlands, Cambodia and Singapore, and 11 international organizations including the UN, World Bank, African Union and ASEAN were invited as guests. It was chaired by Indonesia.
Leading up to the G20 meeting, the host nation, Indonesia, called on "leaders to focus on shoring up health systems and boosting food and energy security" and to focus on "consensus instead of division." Indonesia asked G20 members who had been "vocal against Putin to tone down the rhetoric in order to focus consensus on other issues."
While the host country and others tried to speak to and address the main theme of the Summit, the U.S./NATO bloc focused on pushing all present to sanction Russia for causing the crisis caused by NATO's eastward expansion and proxy war aimed at isolating and crushing Russia. Matters of food security, building on public health, climate change, debt and international tax reform, among others, took a back seat to the U.S./NATO barrage of disinformation. These countries had initially lobbied to bar Russia from attending the Bali meeting but did not succeed. Prior to the Bali summit, Prime Minister Trudeau told the media, "My focus is going to be making sure that the world comes together to reinforce that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin made a terrible, terrible choice when he decided to invade a peaceful neighbouring country."
In light of their failure to bar Russia, side-meetings of NATO and G7 leaders issued a joint statement against Russia which only underscores their failure to dictate the consensus they sought.
The final communiqué of the G20 meeting stands as testimony to that failure. More sober heads prevailed and derailed that onslaught into a more generic acknowledgment of fact, that the Ukraine crisis is having negative consequences globally. Item three of the Bali Summit Declaration states: "Most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed it is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy -- constraining growth, increasing inflation, disrupting supply chains, heightening energy and food insecurity, and elevating financial stability risks. There were other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions."
Prior to the start of the G20 meeting, there was also a three-hour meeting between President Xi of China and President Biden of the U.S. where the two leaders discussed issues of contention including the One-China Policy, security in the Indo-Pacific region and other matters.
The U.S. and its retinue are trying to use the G20 as an instrument to further the private interests which are driving their policies. Immediately prior to the G20 meeting, something called the B20 was convened in Bali on November 13-14. The B20 was established in 2010 to be a key "influencer" in G20 proceedings. It brought together some 2,000 financiers, business executives and owners from the biggest global monopolies from the G20 countries representing some 6.5 million businesses around the world. They gathered to set out the policy recommendations they expected the G20 to address.
With such a powerful business lobby, the pressing issues facing humanity such as the increasing number of people facing food insecurity, global unemployment, climate change and other critical matters were sidelined.
U.S.-Led Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment
At the G20 summit, how the U.S. is fraudulently presenting itself, with Canada in tow, as interested in addressing the critical situation which exists in many African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean countries was further revealed. U.S. President Biden pushed forward on its U.S.-led Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) created in June 2022 when the G7 met. Biden said:
"In June, I joined my fellow G7 leaders to officially launch the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, with the collective goal of mobilizing $600 billion in five years for quality, sustainability, and innovative infrastructure, and investments in low- and middle-income countries. As I've spoken with my Canadian friends, this is something that we have an obligation to do, it seems to me, to deal with those nations that are not the primary cause of many of our problems, but are now left with a great deal of difficulty. I want to emphasize the word "investments" -- investments that are driven by local needs, in development with our partners, and delivering real results to improve the lives of all of our people."
In this way, the U.S. is planning, along with Canada, to fleece low- and middle-income countries by making them pay the price of private pay-the-rich infrastructure projects. Their intention to block China's further development of its Belt and Road Initiative around the world that was started in 2013 is going to cause further havoc, anarchy and violence.
Another announcement made at the Bali G20 Summit was the official launching of a Pandemic Fund, ostensibly to assist low- and middle-income countries recover from the pandemic. Noteworthy is the fact that this fund is being run by the World Bank, which itself is an instrument of Anglo-American imperialism that has caused the impoverishment of countless people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America through demanding the privatization of their economies, restructuring and so forth.
At the G20, Indonesian President Widodo announced the launch of the Fund, which currently has confirmed pledges of $1.4 billion from 24 private and public sector donors. Widodo underscored that the amount falls woefully short of meeting its annual target of U.S.$10 billion. No pledges were made at the G20 to commit to raising this amount except to "encourage donations."
It shows the lack of interest on the part of the U.S. and its retinue at the G20 to see their own Pandemic Fund succeed. Their alleged commitment to seeing the world "Recover Together, Recover Stronger" is basically a media campaign which serves to keep blocking providing any problem facing humankind with solutions. On the contrary, under the guise of alleviating poverty and addressing drought, human rights and democratic governance, it is the private interests affiliated with the U.S. state that continue to infiltrate everywhere to block change which helps the people.
The failure of the U.S./NATO-led attempt at the G20 to isolate and blame Russia for the Ukraine crisis and, by extension, for all the ills of the global economy, debunks the myth that the world is united behind the U.S./NATO block against Russia.
The Bali G20 Summit was another occasion which revealed that the U.S./NATO forces and their allies are in crisis. Try as it may, the U.S. is not able to simply impose its dictate on the world by blaming Russia, as well as China, for the global economic crisis and for the Ukraine crisis. The attempt to block China through the PGII will also fail because its aim is not to help the world's peoples but to impoverish and enslave them.
(With files from G20, Government of Indonesia, White House, Global TV)
This article was published in
Volume 52 Number 8 - November 2022
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2022/Articles/MS520816.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca