At the G20 summit in Argentina in November, it was counted as a major achievement that the assembled world leaders were able to produce a joint communiqué. That normally routine task had proved beyond the leaders who had assembled a few weeks earlier at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Papua New Guinea. There was also no final communiqué agreed at the G7 summit in Canada earlier in the year.
The fact that world leaders are finding it so hard to agree on common forms of words, however bland, is troubling. It points to a breakdown in trust and the mechanisms of international co-operation. That state of affairs must improve over the coming year — or the world will be dangerously vulnerable to an economic or financial crisis that might require a co-ordinated global response. Even without an emergency, the leaders of the world’s largest economies will need to rediscover the habit of co-operation or the world could drift into an intensified trade war.
A key sign of the health (or otherwise) of international governance will be how well the G20 functions in 2019, when Japan will chair it. The Japanese can potentially play the role of bridge-builders, as close allies of US and also major trading partners of China. For while it is clear the most important discussions on the US-China trade dispute will take place directly between Washington and Beijing, the whole world has a stake in the outcome.