Photo released by German Chancellor’s office shows the isolation of U.S. President Donald Trump at the just-concluded G7 summit.
President Donald Trump said the United States will not sign a joint agreement with other G-7 countries, an abrupt reversal that will further erode relations with key U.S. allies and underscore the country’s increasing isolation under Trump.
None of America’s first twenty-six Presidents—spanning a hundred and twenty years—held a summit. None of them even got to Europe while in office. Woodrow Wilson was the first to travel across the Atlantic, when he went to Paris for peace talks to end the First World War. That summit still holds records. Wilson spent six months in France, with one short break back home.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivering the keynote address at the Shangri La Dialogue, in Singapore on June 1, 2018. Photo/PIB
With Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy set to boost India’s role in the region, New Delhi is working hard to avoid being caught in the middle of the growing rivalry between China and the United States, observers said. That might have explained why Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared to avoid mentioning the “quadrilateral strategic dialogue” – a US-led grouping of four regional powers including Australia, Japan and India, also known as “the Quad” – during his speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a regional security summit, in Singapore over the weekend.
If top officials in Washington and Tokyo are to be believed, the application of “maximum pressure” through United Nations sanctions was decisive in bringing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the summit table. Pyongyang has been the target of a string of UN bans from trade to travel for more than a decade, the toughest coming in September when they were expanded to cover crude oil. Just six months later Kim sent a message offering to meet US President Donald Trump with no strings attached.
Kim Jong-un has made a second surprise visit to China, in another sign of warming ties between the two communist states just weeks ahead of Kim’s planned meeting with the US President Donald Trump. The visit, the first time he is known to have travelled by plane as leader, was his second visit to China in the space of just over a month.
Tensions with China have pushed Asian nations including India and Japan to boost military spending, according to a global arms spending report. India’s defence spending rose by 5.5 per cent to US$63.9 billion in 2017, overtaking that of France as it became one of the world’s top five military spenders, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in a report released on Wednesday. The United States, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia were the leading four last year in military spending.
He’s been known as the “French Obama” to some, and the Roman god “Jupiter” to others. But this week, French President Emmanuel Macron has earned himself a new nickname: “Trump Whisperer.” The French president was anointed with the new moniker on the eve of his visit to Washington, where this week he becomes the first foreign leader to be hosted by President Donald Trump for a formal state visit.
Trump’s willingness to meet with North Korea’s dictator is not really comparable to the opening of relations between the U.S. and China. The latter was far more important strategically and economically for both countries. What’s more, the geopolitical conditions that drove China to go to Nixon were entirely different from those today for the grandson of the “Great Leader” in Pyongyang.
China has transformed the Indo-Pacific region’s strategic landscape in just five years. If other powers do not step in to counter further challenges to the territorial and maritime status quo, the next five years could entrench China’s strategic advantages.
Let’s face it: Trump likes strongmen. He likes Putin, Erdoğan, Duterte and Xi. It’s the namby-pamby Western leaders, especially the women like Merkel and May, whom he views with disdain. From this perspective, Kim is the big kahuna, the ultimate catch. A good relationship with him might even pave the road to Stockholm, where Trump could receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
