Security matters: G20 Foreign Ministers meet on Afghanistan

On September 22 2021, the Foreign Ministers of the G20 under the chairmanship of the Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs Luigi Di Maio, convened for a virtual gathering given the ongoing complications of the pandemic for in-person summitry. Sixteen ministers were present (including the US, France, Germany, the UK, China and India) as well as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

While Zoom-plomacy may still be taking its odd first steps as a new normal in international relations, something else occurred at that gathering which made it stand out: the raison d’être of the summit was an exchange of ideas between G20 member nations on Afghanistan, given the recent US withdrawal, the return of the Taliban and the overall potential threat it poses for global security, which certainly concern NATO allies, but also other G20 members like Turkey, Russia, India and China, who now have to deal with a new geopolitical wildcard in their very backyards.

The Afghanistan discussion at the gathering stood out, because since its inception under Mexican auspices in 2012, the Foreign Ministers’ G20 has carefully sidestepped “hard” global security issues - leaving them in the purview of the G7 - focusing instead on less contentious issues involving broad multilateralism and cooperation, with the notable exception of the 2013 St. Petersburg summit, where Russia stepped up in an impromptu yet welcomed fashion with an emergency proposal to broker the Syrian chemical weapons stocks’ disarmament to avoid a Western-led strike, after the Assad regime crossed the Obama “red line.”

This time around, the G20 Foreign Ministers’ security matters agenda, while a bit circumstantial, appears more deliberate, and signals that we truly now are firmly footed in a multipolar new world order, for the first time in almost a century. It took root progressively in many ways, over the last decade.

In rather explicit ways, Russia and China have become eager to assert their authorities within what they see as their close spheres of influence, like in Crimea, Eastern Europe or in Hong Kong or around the South China Sea, and as the new brokers in the Middle East and Asia, all while Western countries became embattled in endless wars and nation-building efforts with limited impacts and extremely high human, financial and political costs.

In response, just recently, we have seen the new AUKUS alliance emerge on the far eastern horizon between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States to counter Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific.

Even middle powers are putting their chips in the game. Back in 2010, Turkey and Brazil attempted to independently broker a deal with Iran over its nuclear operations, and we are also seeing the members of the very diverse “G4” (Brazil, Germany, India and Japan) whose main common goals are permanent seats for themselves on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), coming up with a range of initiatives on their own, on the sidelines of the G20 Foreign Ministers’ meeting.

All the aforementioned countries (except for Iran) are G20 members. And while regional and interests-based alliances are in the natural order of diplomacy and must be allowed to be, the G20’s chief diplomats must not forget that they are part of a broader framework in which the actions of one country ripple in all others, and will affect them in the end too. It is in that spirit that the G20 Foreign Ministers’ group should continue exploring a progressive adoption of a security agenda, and eventually formalize its foray in matters of war and peace.

In that very spirit, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono suggested in 2018 that the G20 Foreign Ministers gathering might eventually constitute a good venue in the future for head diplomats to smooth out global security issues.

He is not alone in thinking so. Just recently, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi declared that he was hoping the G20 Foreign Ministers’ could play a “constructive role” on Afghanistan. For China, finding itself under increasing international pressure, it likely sees that forum as a place to discuss and spar on equal footing among peers, somewhat removed from the direct pressure of leaders, where it can advance and possibly negotiate its priorities among competing interests, as opposed to the G7 where it does not hold a seat.

Watchers, diplomats and academics may point out that a lack of traditional joint communiqué at the conclusion of the September 22 meeting means a lack of consensus, and then bring into question the relevance of the gathering. 

In response, one could argue that the fact that the Afghanistan discussion was even held between G20 members is significant. For over a decade, the repetitive G7 Foreign Ministers’ communiqués and their lofty goals have had a generally limited impact on global security matters. In Israel-Palestine, in Syria, in Crimea, in Iran, in North Korea and as it happens, in Afghanistan, facts on the ground did not change much because the G7’s chief diplomats expressed their ongoing concerns or encouragement.

While it is true that the G20 Foreign Ministers did not issue a communiqué after the virtual meeting, the group should not be demeaned for it. Significant differences on policies and interests exist on ongoing geopolitical matters. But the venue exists. The ministers met. The discussion was held. And that is not insignificant.

For nearly two years now, the COVID-19 pandemic has put the entire world in a state of shock. Fragile states, shuttered business, vulnerable people and a changing climate are severely mortgaging the physical and metaphysical world order and the institutions which support it. The potential for signalling failure and catastrophic errors, as emerging nations compete to fill the new regional power vacua, is high. 

It is therefore sensible that every venue for communication and cooperation, as imperfect or unorthodox as it may be, must be encouraged. As a venture, an arm’s length removed from its leaders in an era of managed democracy and trendy authoritarianism, a flexible G20 Foreign Ministers forum can be a force to be reckoned with, even virtually through a seemingly inane quick group call on Zoom.

As such, it holds much promise, and it is not unlike the Concert of Europe in the post-Napoleonic world which helped keep a relative peace in multipolar Europe between 1814 and 1914. A century after that fact, a G20 Foreign Ministers’ group could help steer and infuse the UNSC with political leadership, as well as the technical, cooperation organizations and agencies which work to ensure relative peace and security worldwide.

Come next year, it will be interesting to see if the next G20 host, Indonesia, at a crossroads hub in the Indo-Pacific, deems it in its interest to pursue and broaden the security discussion in the G20, as China mobilizes allies and rivals alike in its ascent and assertiveness.

Western nations may have legitimate gripes in having to deal with authoritarians or strongmen regimes. However, the fact remains that in this day and age, peace and stability in rough geopolitical neighbourhoods are not likely to be achieved in a consensus built between friends, allies and democrats half a world away, but rather between competing, rival, even enemy nations.

The new world is here. It is odd, unexpected, unforeseen and unpredictable. In attempting to find workable configurations, the G20 nations, their governments and their head diplomats must strive to make the most of it, for global peace and stability is in the interest of all.

A Waltz on the Red Line : Will the G20 Call the Tune Again?

On April 4, 2017, the town of Khan Shaykhun in Syria was hit by a chemical attack resulting in the deaths of 75 to 100 people. The use of sarin gas is suspected. The Syrian opposition claims that government aircraft delivered the payload, while the Assad regime claims its airstrike hit a rebel stockpile of the deadly gas.

In response, on April 6, 2017, U.S. president Donald Trump authorized the use of force against the Shayrat Air Base from where the strike on Khan Shaykhun was launched. The U.S. Navy fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles, damaging the base and killing 7 to 15 people.

President Trump, who campaigned on non-engagement with the Assad regime, changed his position after seeing the images of children affected by the chemical attack. He then said the Obama administration bore responsibility for this latest attack, because it had refused to enforce its own "red line" policy, when that line was crossed in the chemical attack in Goutha on August 21, 2013.

The problem with that statement is that it is simply not true. In late summer 2013 after the Goutha attack, U.S. and UK forces in the Mediterranean were on a war footing and just about to launch strikes against regime forces in Syria. The war drums were beating loudly at the G20 leaders' summit in St. Petersburg that year where its host, President Vladimir Putin, was under severe international pressure to rein in its Syrian protégé. At the very last minute, the G20's foreign ministers were convened for an emergency meeting in the Russian city. A combination of coercive and quiet diplomacy led Assad's Syria to get rid of its chemical weapons under the auspices of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

As I described in my blog in 2013, the shocker during the St. Petersburg Summit came when Putin suggested to U.S. president Barack Obama that Syria cede control of its chemical weapons stockpile to international authorities in exchange for the informal coalition not to launch air strikes against Syria. Should Syria have failed to do so, Russia suggested it might even join the military effort against Damascus. The U.S. government responded with very guarded optimism about the Russian initiative. But after positive signals came from Damascus, topped off by a meeting in Geneva between foreign ministers John Kerry from the United States and Sergei Lavrov from Russia a few days later, a satisfactory agreement was concluded.

By striking at regime targets in Syria on April 6, 2017, the United States has dramatically raised the stakes as well as the risk of direct confrontation with Assad's chief ally, Russia. The last four years have been a dangerous waltz on the red line, but Trump's actions in the last days signal a new dance, whose steps are unknown. The way from here is not only unclear, but also extremely dangerous for the region and the international community.

This uncertainty adds to the fact that the G20 foreign ministers did not produce a communiqué at their meeting on February 16-17, 2017. This was perhaps because big and regional powers are at odds over the political and military fault line running from the Baltic Sea to the Persian Gulf.

The fault line, at the right of your screen.

On July 7-8, 2017, G20 leaders will meet in Hamburg, Germany, for their annual summit. It will be the first encounter between Presidents Trump and Putin. It will be the biggest showdown the international community has seen in decades. The once economically focused forum will take on the mantle of global security matters by default.

Behind the scenes, the leaders' sherpas will likely be working around the clock to try to align their respective countries' increasingly irreconcilable positions on Syria. However, if their work fails, a worst-case scenario could look like this:

It is in keeping with Trump's nature that he could attempt to build a big and bold coalition supporting strikes against Syria in order to intimidate Putin in front of his peers. As a first test on the world stage, his goal could be to corner the Russian leader and get him to diminish, if not drop, his support for Assad.

On the other hand, Putin could look to outsmart the U.S. and its allies, by stoking tensions with China and Iran, by dividing Europe further over Eastern Ukraine, and by showcasing the result of the indirect support to the so-called Islamic State by the U.S. in its attempts at weakening the Assad government.

The only thing that is certain is that the following weeks will tell us if we are heading for a great collaboration or confrontation in Germany this summer. The stage is set for one of the most important encounters in modern times and until then, the world should expect the unexpected.

A Brave New World Order: Germany Hosts the G20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting

When I first wrote about the possible creation of G20 Foreign Ministers’ group in back 2009 and 2010 in my thesis Pre-Emptive Peace: Collective Security and Rogue States in the 21st Century, the world was a very different place.

People were coming together to find a common way out of the 2008 economic crisis. The G20 Leaders met for the first time and expanded upon their Finance Ministers’ work. The BRICs were starting to counter-balance the G7 countries with their enormous populations, important industrial outputs and distinct foreign policies. Brazil and Turkey were UN Security Council Members and were working with Iran to try and find a way out of the nuclear deadlock. The United States and Russia were resetting their relationship, while North Korea’s threats were becoming increasingly serious, with its atomic tests and the sinking of a South Korean warship. Last but not least, the pre-Arab Spring Middle East was relatively stable.

The conditions were favorable for the creation of a G20 Foreign Ministers’ track that would handle building consensus and showing leadership over international security matters, namely in matters of nuclear proliferation. Looking at a map, it is obvious Russia, China, Turkey and India were in fact better positioned to deal with Iran and North Korea than the United States or France could be. The G20 could therefore signal intent of constructive engagement and dispatch regional powers to engage with rogue states’ leadership in search of solutions. After all, the economic and security fates of G20 countries were and still are so intertwined that the victories and defeats of one can be the victories and defeats of all.

The thesis I wrote advocated that sociological liberalism would pave the way for a better world. Good relationships between national leaders and ministers in the G20, regardless of their political orientation and developed through the building a common front over nuclear proliferation for instance, would benefit them personally as well as the countries they represent, by providing a safer, more stable world with more economic opportunities for its population.

The birth of the group

In February 2012, Mexico took the lead by inviting the G20’s head diplomats for an informal meeting on global governance – and their communiqué stated that they looked into “how the G20 could more effectively address some of the most pressing challenges in global governance and take action to address not only sporadic crises but also to address the system’s structural needs in order to prevent future crises.” The G20 Foreign Ministers group had finally come to be.

Its usefulness and relevance was demonstrated the next year. It was reconvened at the last minute in September 2013 by Russia over the chemical weapons crisis in Syria, to try and find a way out of the seemingly inevitable conflict that was set to happen between a Western coalition and President Assad’s regime. Days later, Russia brokered a deal with the US involving the handing over and destruction of the Syrian military’s chemical weapons stockpile through the OPCW, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that year in recognition of their work which avoided another war in the Middle East.

Russia rising

A few months later, the fragile balance and relative common front over international security came apart when Russia started intervening in Crimea and supported armed groups in Eastern Ukraine. The move by Putin’s government in asserting its sphere of influence this close to European Union borders did not sit well with the world community and isolated its country. Russia was slapped with tough economic sanctions and suspended from the G8 (which went back to a G7).

Since that point, the G20 Foreign Ministers’ group had no reason to reconvene. Although they met for an informal working lunch in Turkey in November 2015 (which produced no common declaration), its members stand divided on the appropriate and efficient responses to global security issues – like in Ukraine and Syria. Moreover, many states face their own internal divisions at home, which has resulted in patchwork foreign policy with no clear means and no clear goals in recent years.

New world order

We are currently facing an uncertain, uncharted post-liberalism new world order. It is the most significant reconfiguration of power, politics and priorities since the end of the Cold War.

Iran has settled for a deal over its use of nuclear power and has pretty much reintegrated the world community, while North Korea, has waltzed into pathetic irrelevance under a new Kim.

The Arab Spring has turned to Winter and for the most part, it has failed to live up the expectations of those who rose and bled in its name in Egypt and Libya, leaving the Western powers embarrassingly dumbfounded.

Populist movements are in vogue rising throughout the world. They have made the United Kingdom exit the European Union, elected Donald Trump to the US presidency, maintained the ever-assertive Vladimir Putin at the helm of Russia with record approval ratings, and now have set their sights on France. Migrant crises and austerity budgets have damaged confidence in international institutions and have revived old national identities.

Turkey is becoming increasingly autocratic and turning eastwards, NATO has to face how far its members are committed to the defense of the alliance, while the BRICs are generally failing to truly prosper in a sluggish global economy.

The threats to G20 nations are not necessarily existential nowadays, but they are nonetheless deeply philosophical. Their main challenge is represented by a political and military fault line that links the Gulf of Finland to the Persian Gulf - from the Baltic States, through Eastern Ukraine, across the Mediterranean through the heart of Turkey and into the dark blot of ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

It is along that line that 21st century Western political history will be decided. Will there be agreements and peace? Will nations simply let the confrontations turn into frozen conflicts? Or will they actually come to blows with one another?

The case for reconvening

The necessity and urgency of finding ways to mend differences and coordinating responses along the fault line are enough to warrant a reconvening of the G20 Foreign Ministers. Head diplomats from G20 countries will have to be agents of efficiency by smoothing relations and political terrains ahead of their nations’ leaders, which are increasingly defined by their seemingly intransigent attitudes, their go-at-it-alone ways of doing business and their open distrust of the institutions built by the world community over the last 70 years.

Can the last liberals stem the tide?

It came to my attention last week that Germany had decided to host a meeting of G20 Foreign Ministers on February 16 and 17 in Bonn, ahead of the leaders’ meeting in Hamburg this July. The Ministers will have the difficult yet essential task of building common ground over a world increasingly plagued by deadlocked security issues directly involving the G20’s membership.

This is the first test of the reset world order and the communiqué that will be issued (or not) by the representatives at the end of the two-day gathering will send a strong signal as to the state of international relations and the road ahead for managing the plethora of issues across the fault line.

Fortunately, it is not first time the East and West are at each other’s throats – there are precedents and ways out of the darkness.

It provides moments for liberal-minded countries to shine, like Germany, the engine of the European economy, and Canada, a stable, tolerant country keen on defending and getting involved supranational organizations. Germany could try and rebuild the bridges between Russia and Europe, while Canada can help articulate US foreign policy goals in a way that benefits all.

For Canada especially, there’s an opportunity to seize for Minister Chrystia Freeland, of the likes not seen since the days of Pearson and the Suez Canal crisis. For all the talk of Prime Minister Trudeau about his country being back on the world stage, the G20 offers Canada (ideally partnering with Germany) a chance to work at cementing the existence of the G20 Foreign Minsters group as a permanent yet flexible structure to manage the many security issues affecting G20 powers today.

By helping to build a formal rallying point for dialogue and dealmaking on international security, Canada and Germany can carve out their place in the brave new world order. A G20 Foreign Foreign Ministers’ group provides a small yet efficient forum of clear value that can appeal to the various populist movements to which some G20 leaders are accountable.

Can 2014 belong to Russia?

2013 in global security matters truly belonged to Russia. While President Vladimir Putin almost lost face over the Syrian Civil War, he managed to thwart American plans for airstrikes by helping to broker a disarmament deal at the last second. This was such an unforeseen and overall better choice for global security that rumours were circulating that the controversial Russian strongman might be chosen to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead the award went to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The indirect diplomatic signal this sends to Russia is one of encouragement, to incite the nation to go beyond UN vetoes and global grandstanding and propose concrete alternatives, as was the case with Syria.

Many perceived Putin to play a Machiavellian, or Metternich-like role for his own good, but he did indeed contribute to help global security while boosting his standing with the world community and refurbishing Russia’s image as a big power that can be counted on and which can shake up deadlocked situations.

Will lightning strike the same place twice in 2014? The answer is yes, if Vladimir Putin wills it. While the “gay propaganda” law, the tug-o-war with Europe over Ukraine and the recurring problems with terrorism certainly cast a shadow over Russia as it readies to host the Sochi Olympics, Russia will likely want to go beyond a two-week sports celebration to reassert itself with the world community after getting a taste of victory in 2013. And that is not a bad thing for most of us.

For the first time in years we are seeing positive developments on the Iranian front in the light of the Geneva interim agreement. While President Rouhani should ensure that belligerent rhetoric be kept to a minimum – or even better be eliminated altogether – chances are that there will be flare-ups and difficulties in communicating and agreeing on the various points of the road map. But here again, Russia can intervene and keep things together before another situation in the Middle East gets out of hand.

Everybody wins then, right?

The African Winter

These days, eyes are focused on the Middle East. Iran. Syria. Egypt. Old structures crumble, new orders painstakingly attempt to take hold, counter-revolutions erupt. To external witnesses and people living in those conflict zones, it often seems a lost cause, like the myth of Sisyphus.

To them I say: patience. In forty odd years, things will be much more stable, as the dust will have settled, a new generation of leaders will be able to assert itself, and many conflicts will have died down.

Why I am so confident about some upcoming perpetual peace in the Middle East? There are a few factors that come into play: the geographical proximity with Europe, being located alongside critical trade routes, the societal foundations provided by Islam, the back and forth movement of peoples – migrants, businessmen, workers – between the West and the Middle East, the prosperous Middle Eastern diasporas living abroad, the rise of green energy technologies for starters. Mix it all together and leave it to sit for a certain time, and I am convinced that in proper time, the Middle East will become fairly stable.

In 2050, at this rate, the source of global instability will not be Middle East. It will be Africa, which will by then be home to roughly a billion people and the youngest population on the planet.

Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, Boko Haram, the LRA, M-23 and Al-Shabaab do not result from the aftershocks of a post-colonial Africa. They are fillers to a vacuum left by weak, failing and failed states. As the governmental power subsides because of mismanagement, incessant warfare and corruption, militias and other illegal groupings reap the spoils, feed on them and grow without limits. Based in hard-to-reach locales, their local influence grows – they provide an alternative to the young and the disenfranchised. Weak African governments find them embarrassing and they dismiss them, while Western powers largely ignore them because they are not a strategic threat to their current wants or needs. Somehow, the near takeover of Mali in late 2012 by terrorist militias, only stopped by a French military intervention, was not a strong enough signal that the current system is not working.

By 2050 the world will fully turn to Africa, the largest reservoir of untapped resources – be it oil, gold, medicinal plants or precious minerals. In that field, China has a massive head start and has long been exchanging its expertise and engineering teams in exchange for unsustainable, bargain-priced resource concessions. All the while, Western powers are notoriously complicit to similar schemes in the mining sector in sub-Saharan Africa.

What does Africa need then? It needs a middle class.

What struck me the most in my trips to sub-Saharan Africa is the ridiculous disparity between the rich and the poor. It’s not just a gap, it’s a massive canyon. The business and political elites maintain themselves in power for decades on end, ensuring a backyard playground for big powers – most notably France. This is all tied up nicely by big foreign aid packages which land in the pockets of the same old people, sweet business deals benefitting politicians that have been in power for decades. All the while deals are sealed in villa-fortresses of African leaders, far away from the eyes of an uneducated populace being lead on, year after year.

Such a system cannot carry on forever. You cannot say you love your country and agree to such bad terms. You cannot say you uphold a constitution when most of your people are illiterate. You cannot expect people to become rich when resources are practically given away and sent off as soon as they are extracted. Someday, there will be consequence.

Some day, this will backfire badly. Then we will see some of the most vicious militias in History, some of the most violent acts performed on human beings, all the while migrations flows will explode, states will become utterly chaotic, and the resources we need will become the poker chips of groups who want to harm us.

This will happen, unless we help to build a viable, strong middle class. A group in the citizenry who are literate, who can innovate, who can be taxed and participate in a healthy democracy.

African diasporas living abroad must be involved in developing their home countries. African populations themselves must be involved in this effort so that a middle class can emerge which is tailored to their realities and needs. Businesses must agree to give workers better pay and better living conditions. International help should be focused on developing infrastructures like roads, train tracks, airports, seaports, hydroelectric dams, solar farms, power grids. Big businesses should be given tax incentives by big powers to encourage training, mentorship, research and development in Africa so that they can reap even greater benefits down the road, in a sustainable way.

While all wonder what the fate of the Arab Spring will be, let us not forget that we must do all we can to avoid an African Winter down the road.

A time of transitions

The climate in international relations often shifts faster than weather patterns in Iceland. What has transpired earlier this month at the G20 gathering in St. Petersburg was nothing short of exceptional. I have waited this long to blog about it because I wanted to be sure that the promises that had been made and the decisions that had been taken were not just spur of the moment, Machiavellian distractions destined to save face and preserve the status quo.

The Syrian crisis was inevitably going to be the elephant in the room at the G20 summit. While it was likely to be discussed, chances were that no matter of substance would be agreed to, and that we would see a classic clash between the “pro-Imperialists” versus the “pro-rogue states”, defeating the opportunity to find some kind of middle ground amongst a series of terrible options.

It was announced on September 3 that “key” G20 Foreign Ministers would attend the summit in Russia, from the usual Western bunch but also, most interestingly, Brazil, China and Turkey, in an ad-hoc manner.

Stewart Patrick, of the Council for Foreign Relations, then published a blog post reiterating the relevance of the G20 creating a Foreign Ministers’ track, especially in the light of the events unfolding in Syria, which he had elaborated on earlier this year in a memo to the Russian government.

Tensions were high going into St. Petersburg and divisions appeared to make positions between East and West rather irreconcilable at first.

But as time went by, interesting developments occurred, as wrote Professor John Kirton:

Syria dominated the St. Petersburg Summit, both in the discussions among the leaders and their delegations on the first day, and in the attention of the media and citizens around the world for a longer time. 

The leaders showed that the G20 summit, initially designed as an economic institution, was now a full-strength centre of global governance, able and willing to address not just newer security threats such as corruption and terrorism but also more classic ones such as the use of chemical weapons by a government against its own people. Following the August chemical weapons attack in Syria, and the denials and divisions among major powers in the following two weeks, Russia's Vladimir Putin as summit host suddenly invited G20 foreign ministers to St. Petersburg and then added to the leaders' opening dinner at the summit a three-hour discussion dedicated to Syria where every leader had a say. 

This allowed about half the leaders an opportunity to express strong support for the approach of "deter and deny" through limited missile strikes led by the presidents of the United States and France. Support came from the leaders of a domestically constrained United Kingdom, an instinctively reticent Japan, a long cautious Germany facing an election on September 22, a long reluctant Canada and an initially doubtful Italy, as well as Turkey as an ally in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a front-line state, and Saudi Arabia as a leading regional power. 

There seemed to be slight accommodating shifts in Putin's behaviour and position, as he suspended deliveries of Russia's sophisticated S-300 missile to Syria and did not deny that chemical weapons had been used there. There further emerged a common condemnation of the use of chemical weapons and consensus that they should not be used again by anyone, and not become a regular weapon of war. Should these advances politically deter and degrade Assad regime even before U.S. missiles fly or speed a transition to a less violent Syria, the St. Petersburg Summit will prove to be a striking substantive as well as institution-strengthening success.

However, the shocker during the G20 summit came when Russia’s Vladimir Putin made a suggestion to US President Barack Obama for Syria to cede control of its chemical weapons stockpile to international authorities in exchange for the informal coalition not to launch air strikes against Syria. Should Syria fail to do so, Russia might even join the military effort against Damascus. It was reported on a few days later, and the US government responded with very guarded optimism at the Russian initiative, but after positive signals coming from Damascus topped off by a meeting between John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov in Geneva a few days later, a satisfactory agreement was concluded.

Al-Assad’s regime suddenly fell in line, expediently joined the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and complied over all the initial demands and promised to destroy its entire chemical weapon stockpile by mid-2014. The rules of the game were just agreed to unanimously by the UN Security Council Resolution 2118.

While the current standing does not solve the Syrian conflict in itself, it averted another war in the Middle East. It has bolstered US-Russia relations, the relevance of the G20, the relevance of the UN Security Council, diplomacy and international law.

Moreover, the peaceful settlement of differences has helped to bring Iran’s new moderate president Hassan Rouhani to have a direct contact with Barack Obama, the first such Iran-US exchange in 30 years, leading to the exchange of messages of good will in terms of promptly solving the nuclear issue in the Islamic Republic.

We must hope that this climate holds. We must hope that diplomacy prevails over the use of force. We must hope that Russia (and BRICSAM nations alike) realizes it can use its power and influence for good. But we must also hope that the G20 gains a permanent diplomatic track to help find solutions to global security matters which cannot be found anywhere else.

The Uninvited Guest

As world leaders gather in St. Petersburg to discuss the fragile global economic recovery, one uninvited guest is poised to crash the party and make a whole lot of noise: the Syrian crisis. As proof of the use of chemical weapons is gathered, dead bodies continue to pile up and the threat of a regional conflagration involving Israel, Iran and Iraq rises, the Syrian civil war will be the elephant in the room at the Russian G20 Summit and might very well overtake the economy as the focal point of discussions, thereby changing the nature of the organization by osmosis.

Up to this point, global security matters have been the “jurisdiction” of the G8, not the G20. Aside from an informal meeting of the G20’s Foreign Ministers in Mexico in February 2012, the organization has refrained from expanding its mandate. But the ongoing war in Syria, the East versus West deadlock over rogue states and the threat they pose as well the economic disruptions coming from the Middle East make it now painfully obvious that the world’s great powers, some of which have been playing the Cold War game in the past three years, must now come together, agree to a solution and carry it out.

Russia’s reluctance to play the new multipolar game and its bad habit of falling back to Soviet-style foreign policy of Western fear-mongering, UN vetoes and arming rogue regimes has been ridiculously puzzling. In fact, if there was a country which could have made a strong and swift difference and increased its standing through a proactive role, it would have been Russia.

Obama’s scheduled one-on-one meeting with the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping will certainly aim at finding common ground with China for them to at least abstain vetoing a UN Security Council resolution, and its secondary aim is certainly to make Vladimir Putin isolated – the Snowden affair being a convenient excuse to avoid a larger discussion on foreign policy.

In the past 24 hours however, Putin has changed his tune to something more reasonable and pragmatic, echoing the United Nations’ Ban Ki Moon, shifting from drastically opposing any action on Syria to possibly endorsing a strike at the Security Council if the proof is made public and actually adds up – which is balanced position, all things considered. The pressures from the diplomatic back channels must have been intense.

Hosting the G20 is a moment for prestige for a country, a moment to shine. But for Vladimir Putin, it is his last window of opportunity for a certain time as a global statesman, to build bridges and play a constructive game and get Russia to step out of the shadow of the USSR, embrace multilateralism and play a meaningful role in the global community.

Stay tuned and watch how the US, Russian and Chinese discourses on Syria change in the coming days - it might just herald the changing nature of the G20.

*** 15:30 EDT UPDATE ***

I have just received this Google Alert out of Reuters:

G20 foreign ministers to attend Russia summit to discuss Syria
Source: Reuters - Tue, 3 Sep 2013 02:59 PM

PARIS, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Foreign ministers from key G20 member states will convene on the sidelines of this week's meeting in St Petersburg to discuss Syria, France said on Tuesday.

"(French) Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius will travel on Sept. 5 and 6 to meet foreign ministers present at the G20 summit, notably those of the United States, Brazil, China, Russia and Turkey," Foreign Ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot told reporters.

A French diplomatic source said the ministers, who do not usually attend G20 summits, would meet to specifically talk about the Syria crisis and discuss political perspectives. (Reporting By John Irish, editing by Mike Peacock).

Source: http://www.trust.org/item/20130903145324-c5h6c