“I always said that this wouldn’t be easy and that we shouldn’t hide areas of discord,” Chancellor Angela Merkel, the summit host, told reporters on Saturday at the end of two days of talks. “The communique has to reflect those areas where there is no consensus.”

The G-20 meeting in Hamburg agreed to fight protectionism while tacitly recognizing Trump’s concerns about excess steel capacity and what he says are unfair trade practices. On climate change, the US was again isolated, with all 19 other members agreeing that the Paris accord on cutting emissions was “irreversible.”

World leaders forged a fragile compromise at a summit in Germany that failed to conceal the reality that Donald Trump’s America is increasingly going its own way.


As anti-globalization protesters clashed with police across Hamburg, burning cars and looting shops, G-20 officials struggled to bridge their differences. The difficulty in reaching a form of language acceptable to all hints at the fallout to come from the Trump administration’s breach with the postwar order and his turn toward an America First stance.

“The US seems to be emphasizing ‘we retain full right to take unilateral action,”’ said Thomas Bernes, a former International Monetary Fund and World Bank official who is now a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, in Waterloo, Canada. “They’ve stepped aside from a system which they helped largely to create and it’s a little bit rudderless now.”

The last global summit, the G-7’s meeting in May, saw huge divisions over climate and trade and this meeting was no different. Leaders are concerned about a potential trade war over steel as Trump gears up for a decision on whether to impose punitive tariffs amid ongoing complaints about dumping on global markets.

The final G-20 statement pledged renewed efforts to combat excess capacity in the steel industry, while referring to the use of “trade defense instruments.” So despite some compromises, the US still has a mechanism at hand to declare a trade war over steel at any time.


French President Emmanuel Macron, in his closing press conference, said that it’s a “profound mistake” to judge the benefits of trade through the prism of deficits or surpluses. He gave the example of his Apple iPhone, which is designed in the US, made in China with some US parts, and sold in Europe — an argument he first advanced to his fellow G-20 leaders in response to Trump’s assertion that he will always defend American workers.

“Protectionism and dumping are both bad answers to our problems,” Macron said.

The final statement also underlined Trump’s lone stand on climate change, saying that all G-20 members except for the US “state that the Paris Agreement is irreversible.”

In the statement, the US announced that “it will immediately cease the implementation of its current nationally-determined contribution and affirms its strong commitment to an approach that lowers emissions while supporting economic growth and improving energy security needs.”