Indonesia Hosts G-20 Foreign Ministers
Foreign ministers from G-20 nations gather today on the Indonesian island of Bali for a two-day meeting in which the war in Ukraine is expected to dominate conversation.
The meeting is another chance for the world’s largest economies to take stock of the economic impacts of the war, and includes many major countries who have decided to stay neutral in the conflict, like India, Brazil, and host Indonesia.
It’s also a chance for the host nation to showcase its diplomatic strength ahead of a potentially fraught leaders meeting in October. As things stand, Indonesia has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend, despite pressure from Western nations to keep him away.
As one of the many non-aligned nations caught between the West and Russia over the war in Ukraine, Indonesia has been walking a diplomatic tightrope. Indonesia has a stake in both camps: As a customer for Russian military equipment and due to its reliance Ukrainian wheat.
In June, President Joko Widodo visited both Kyiv and Moscow in a bid to free up food and fertilizer supplies frozen by the war. Earlier at the G-7 summit, Widodo pressed the group to limit the impact of sanctions on global food supplies.
Indonesians are suspicious of the major powers. Trust in both China and the United States has plummeted in the last ten years, according to a recent poll taken by the Lowy Institute. Just 56 percent of those polled said they trusted the United States to act responsibly, down from 72 percent in 2011. China saw a similar drop, albeit from a lower position: 60 percent trusted China to act responsibly in 2011 versus 42 percent today.
When the poll asked about confidence in other world leaders, a surprising choice topped the list: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He was followed by UAE leader Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, while U.S. President Joe Biden placed fourth.
The cold shoulder. Although the question of whether Putin will attend October’s summit in person is still open, his chief diplomat Sergey Lavrov will be on the ground in Bali today. He’s expected to meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi but not with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Olga Oliker, a Russia expert at the International Crisis Group, said the lack of contact between the top U.S. and Russian diplomats isn’t an accident.
“I think it’s a pretty conscious position from both of them,” Oliker told Foreign Policy. “What are they going to talk about, are they going to talk about Ukraine? Well, the United States isn’t going to do that—it’s not going to talk about Ukraine without Ukraine and certainly the Russians don’t see them as a credible interlocutor for shuttle diplomacy. So, I suspect that the attitude from both sides is very much: what would we be talking about?”
China talks. Blinken will meet with Yang to highlight the U.S. commitment to “intense diplomacy and maintaining open lines of communication” with China, Dan Kritenbrink, the State Department’s senior Asia official, told reporters on Tuesday.
If comments from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian are any indication, the Blinken-Wang meeting may not go smoothly. At a press conference on Wednesday, Zhao hit back at U.S. claims regarding China’s alleged disruption of world order. Zhao said Washington “observes international rules only as it sees fit,” and that the “so-called rules-based international order is actually a family rule made by a handful of countries to serve the U.S. self-interest.”