During a special briefing at the White House Sept. 5, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan presented what President Joe Biden plans to put forward at the Sept. 9-10 G-20 summit in New Delhi. Coming on the heels of the stunning Aug. 22-24 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, where a vision for a new world economic order free from IMF conditionalities and neocolonialist stifling of man’s creative potential was discussed, Sullivan waxed poetic about the virtues of the decrepit institutions of the old unipolar world, the IMF and World Bank, which he vowed will “deliver” results to the Global South.
The U.S. is going to “deliver for developing countries, making progress on key priorities for the American people…and showing our commitment to the G20 as a forum that can actually…deliver,” Sullivan promised. He had the gall to suggest that countries around the world could benefit from the same economic approach the Biden administration has used ‘so successfully’ in the U.S. For those unfamiliar with such, Blinken explained that it was “from the bottom up and the middle out, by making smart investments in the industries of the future, while tackling climate change and empowering workers.” Governments need only look at the state of the U.S.’s decaying real economy to see how successful this strategy has been.
The U.S.’s key focus at the meeting will be “delivering on an agenda of fundamentally reshaping and scaling up the multilateral development banks, especially the World Bank and the IMF,” said Sullivan. Why? Because these are the most “effective tools” for mobilizing “transparent, high-quality investment into developing countries.” The White House has made clear it expects its partners to also contribute beyond the $25 billion the U.S. is handing to the World Bank, and that they should also provide “meaningful debt relief” to low- and middle-income nations.
As an ultimatum, Sullivan said that Biden “will be clear that we need all G20 members to be constructive and at the table with no exceptions.” Naturally, Biden will call for a “just and durable peace” in Ukraine; hence, there will be a focus on Russia’s “illegal and ongoing war….” Of no little note, at last year’s G20 summit, there was no such agreement, and the insistence upon one resulted in there being no final declaration at all.
The final message from Sullivan: Above all, the U.S. will make it clear that “we remain committed to the G20 as a critical forum for all the major economies of the world to come together for global problem solving"— except, of course, the BRICS.
