G-20 Summit to strengthen multilateral cooperation

German Chancellor Angela Merkel

BERLIN: The Group of 20 (G-20) Summit in Germany should strengthen international cooperation and Berlin remains committed to the implementation of a major climate protection agreement, Chancellor Angela Merkel said.
“We’re united in our will to strengthen multilateral relations at the G-20 Summit, that we need an open society, especially open trade flows,” Merkel said during a joint news conference with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
Merkel added that both countries also supported the implementation of the Paris climate protection agreement — a major international pact of which US President Donald Trump announced the US withdrawal.
Lee said Singapore and Germany were both strongly committed to an open international trading system, adding that he expected a free trade agreement with the EU to be signed soon.
Merkel also said she hoped the G-20 meeting would be able to find “compromises and answers” on a wide range of issues.
Merkel said leaders would address regulating financial markets, fighting terrorism and pandemics and combating climate change, among other issues.
She said “free, rule-based and fair trade” will be an important issue.
“You can imagine that there will be discussions that will not be easy,” she said. “Globalization can be a win-win situation. It must not always be that there are winners and losers.”
Putin raps protectionism
On trade, Putin wrote in a guest article for Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper that “politically motivated” sanctions were being used as a form of protectionism.
“Limits by one-sided, politically motivated sanctions on investment, trade and particularly technology transfer are becoming its hidden form,” the Russian leader wrote.
The EU and the US have imposed sanctions on Russia over its actions in Ukraine — for annexing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and for supporting separatists fighting the government in eastern Ukraine — a conflict that has cost 10,000 lives since April 2014.
Putin, however, wrote that such sanctions lead nowhere.
He said they “contradict the G-20 principles” of working together in the interests of all countries.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel earlier said he was supporting the idea of holding future Group of 20 summits in New York, home to UN headquarters.
Good job
Gabriel said in an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio that this year’s host, Hamburg, and its predecessors have done a good job of hosting the summit — but it would make sense to connect the event more closely to the UN.
Gabriel says that many feel left out by 20 heads of state and government “talking about the rest of the world.”
He said he supported a proposal by Martin Schulz, the leader of his center-left party and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s challenger in Germany’s September election, to take the event to the home of the UN.
Gabriel said “that would be a big symbolic step forward.”
Meanwhile, former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev said Trump and Putin need to establish a wide-ranging agenda in their meeting on Friday.
In comments to state news agency RIA-Novosti on Thursday, Gorbachev said the meeting of the Russian and American presidents in Hamburg should emulate the 1986 Reykjavik summit of Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan that substantially advanced US-Soviet relations.