G-20 live updates: Leaders formally endorse corporate global minimum tax, a win for Biden

Once all the leaders had arrived at the summit site — well, at least those participating in person — it was time for a “family photo,” the first at a Group of 20 gathering in more than two years.

The leaders took their places along three levels of a tiered blue stage. Mario Draghi, as the prime minister of the host country, stood in the center. President Biden stood on the farthest end of one side. Just before the picture was taken, two missing figures — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — darted onto the stage as others made room.

When those pleasantries were over, the leaders welcomed doctors and first responders onto the platform as well, applauding as they joined in. Afterward, the leaders headed into a large, ovular hall, ringed by flags, where they will begin the formal part of Saturday’s summit.

A handful of Group of 20 heads were missing from the photo. Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia have not flown to Rome, citing the coronavirus, and are instead expected to participate remotely. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is staying home ahead of elections on Sunday. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is also not present, and has sent his foreign minister in his place.

President Biden arrived at the G-20 summit shortly after 11:30 a.m. local time, formally starting his involvement in the meeting with the world’s largest economies.

He was greeted by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, just outside the headquarters of the summit.

Biden peeled off his mask, shook hands with Draghi and chatted warmly as the two men headed indoors.

The focus of Biden’s day will be a meeting with leaders of Germany, France and Britain — referred to as the E3 nations — to discuss Iran and efforts to resuscitate the 2015 deal meant to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Biden, along with the other world leaders, is also expected to formally endorse a new 15 percent global minimum tax, as his administration continues to work on a separate domestic agreement to pressure corporations to pay more in taxes to fund his sweeping social spending and climate package.

ROME — Security was high as leaders began arriving Saturday morning at the Group of 20 nations summit site, with much of the surrounding neighborhood cleared of cars and pedestrians and declared a “red zone.”

Restrictions on traffic began as far as several miles away from the neighborhood known as EUR, which includes the convention center hosting the leaders. Major roads leading in that direction were blocked by police; only those with accreditation could pass. Around the media center, which is one block away from the convention center, many restaurants and other businesses were closed.

Early Saturday morning, according to the Italian news agency ANSA, police forcibly cleared a group of climate activists who’d been sitting in the middle lanes of Via Cristoforo Colombo, a thoroughfare that leads to EUR. Armored vehicles and riot police also came to the scene, according to ANSA.

The group of protestors, known as Climate Camp, had been trying to call attention to the decisions of the world’s major powers, whose emissions reductions measures have been “wholly inadequate to the catastrophic scenarios that we can see in our present and future on this planet,” the group said.

“We’re here because the G-20 governments have failed.”

In the Roman neighborhood known as EUR, all the classic telltales of Rome drop away. Gone are the cobblestone roads, the antiquities, the worn palazzi dappled like watercolors. What you get instead are broad boulevards and imposing white buildings, plus a man-made lake. Everything is orderly, planned. Look in the right direction, and you’ll even see a sculpture heroically depicting the planner: Benito Mussolini.

Conceived as a fascist showpiece for an event that never happened — war canceled the 1942 World’s Fair — EUR is getting a chance eight decades later to serve as a backdrop for a global gathering: this time, the Group of 20 summit.

Reminders of what EUR (pronounced Ay-oor) was supposed to represent are still vivid. Mussolini had hoped it would stand as an example of an ideal city, with gardens and open spaces, and he commissioned some of the most acclaimed Italian architects and artists to remake a land used previously only by farmers and an abbey of cloistered monks. EUR’s boundaries were marked off in a near-perfect pentagon. Mussolini planted a tree at the 1938 groundbreaking.

But now, EUR also has lanyard-wearing office workers eating $12 salmon wraps. It has monuments designed to glorify the fascist ideal that now house global companies, like Fendi. It has a couple of eerie blocks almost resembling Pyongyang — empty, colossal and colonnaded — but it also has dentist’s office and chain restaurants, energy company headquarters and upper-middle-class apartments.

“What I’ve often heard is that a neighborhood like this could only be built by a dictator,” said Lorenzo Volpato, 49, a self-described leftist who lives and works in EUR and called the neighborhood pleasant regardless of the fascist markers. “It’s got metro stations. It’s modern. It’s more livable than Rome.”

The neighborhood has managed to grow — and normalize — in large part because of a Roman willingness to rebuild, move on and coexist with even the worst parts of the past. It’s especially striking at a time when monuments to enslavers, Confederate generals, kings and colonial leaders have come toppling down across the United States and other parts of Europe. In EUR, such monuments have become just a part of the low-slung skyline.

Mario Draghi’s life, as recently as nine months ago, was far more relaxing than it is now. He spent time at his Umbrian country house. He played golf with his son. His legacy, built as a central banker who had helped to rescue the euro zone from crisis, was already secured.

But with Italy in the depths of the pandemic, and searching for a prime minister, Draghi received an unsolicited invitation from the country’s president.

“And he couldn’t say no,” said Giovanni Orsina, director of the school of government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.

That explains how Draghi, 74 — pulled in from semi-retirement to become prime minister — now finds himself again on the world stage, hosting a Group of 20 summit where the issues are at least as complicated as anything from his past. The two-day summit, dealing chiefly with climate change and the pandemic, will test how meaningfully the world’s industrial powers can ease gaping vaccine inequities and speed reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions. Especially on climate, where countries’ commitments are many times below what science suggests is necessary, there is a considerable risk of failure.

But while Draghi has limited sway on the outcome among the 19 other nations, he has already proved himself in another way, leaving his fingerprints on a country that is hosting the other leaders this weekend.

And what the visitors will find, in Draghi’s Italy, is a country that has become charmed — at least for now — by his political competence and clout. Italian pundits speak about Draghi glowingly, describing him as an above-the-fray prime minister with a degree of credibility that his predecessors lacked. So far, they say, he has been willing to make tough — sometimes unilateral — decisions regardless of their popularity. And he has proved popular nonetheless, with an approval rating of 63 percent, higher than those of most of his fellow democratic leaders who will be visiting Rome.

“Mario Draghi is sort of a Ferrari,” said Giampiero Massolo, president of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, who also served as an Italian diplomat. “He is punching above the weight of Italy.”

President Biden basked in a warm glow from America’s allies on his first foreign trip as president last June, deploying the reassuring promise that “America is back.” But 4 ½ months later, as Biden begins his second round of international summits, U.S. allies are less certain that is the case.

The leaders of America’s closest partners have watched Biden’s popularity plummet while former president Donald Trump has begun holding raucous election-style rallies and making his trademark provocative or false pronouncements on a range of issues. And that is raising questions about the durability of any promises by — or agreements with — the current administration.

“After four years with Trump, the world is very, very curious whether this is a lasting new direction of American politics or we could risk a return to Trumpism in 2024,” said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister who served as NATO secretary general. “It will be an uphill effort for Biden to convince his allies and partners that he has changed American attitudes profoundly.”

Rasmussen said world leaders are watching Virginia’s gubernatorial election on Tuesday and would view a loss — or even a narrow win — by Democrat Terry McAuliffe as a warning sign. “It would add to some skepticism in Europe that the declaration that ‘America is back’ is only temporary,” Rasmussen said.

With Trump holding out the prospect of running for president again, and given a strong chance of claiming the GOP nomination if he does, foreign leaders are viewing Biden’s actions through the prism of American politics to a degree rare in recent years.

“After Biden, it may be Trump again,” said Gerard Araud, a former French ambassador to the United States. “So we Europeans, we have to learn to be grown up, we have to learn to defend or to handle our interests by ourselves.”

President Biden — who has made renewed international engagement a hallmark of his foreign policy ethos — begins a pair of global summits in Europe this week with just a handful of his ambassadors in place, as most of his picks to represent the United States abroad remain mired in messy domestic politics.

To date, only four of Biden’s choices to be a U.S. ambassador to a foreign government have been approved by the Senate — three of them just on Tuesday. That means Biden is lagging considerably behind his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, who at this point in his presidency had 22 such U.S. ambassadors confirmed, 17 of them by voice vote, according to data compiled by Senate Democratic leadership aides.

The delays stem from threats by some Republican senators, led by Ted Cruz (Tex.), who has been angling for a fight with the Biden administration over matters of national security. That is prolonging the usually routine process of getting ambassadors formally installed, while several high-profile posts are also vacant because the White House has yet to put forward nominees for them.

Among the other 19 members of the G-20, 15 of them do not have a U.S. ambassador in place (Indonesia and Russia have U.S. ambassadors who were held over from the Trump administration). Biden has yet to nominate his own pick for Italy, which this year is hosting the annual gathering of leaders from the world’s largest economies, nor for the European Union, United Kingdom, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Australia.

The four ambassadors to foreign governments — Mexico, Turkey, New Zealand and Austria — who have been confirmed are either former senators or the widows of former senators, whom Cruz said he would not block as a courtesy. Cindy McCain, the widow of former senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), was also approved Tuesday as the U.S. representative to a United Nations food agency, which gives her the rank as ambassador. And the Senate approved Linda Thomas-Greenfield as United Nations ambassador as part of the Cabinet confirmations earlier this year.

But as time passes without the Senate processing ambassadors for elsewhere in the globe, allies of the administration are increasingly sounding the alarm about the diplomatic ramifications.

“Public diplomacy is neutered when you don’t have an ambassador,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said. “When six months or a year goes by without a U.S. ambassador, they infer that it’s a value judgment being placed on the relationship.”

The Group of 20 major economies represent some two-thirds of humanity, 85 percent of all global economic output and all of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters. They encompass the world’s most powerful governments and many of its biggest multinational corporations. Where the G-20 goes, the rest of the planet is inextricably bound to follow.

That’s especially true now, as the G-20 deliberations function as a de facto precursor to next week’s United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. The latter has been cast by organizers and activists alike as a defining moment for climate action, though expectations have lowered amid major gaps between various governments and environmental campaigners on the way forward.

The G-20 seems to embody something about our contemporary moment. The bloc first met at the end of the last century in the shadow of the Asian financial crisis. A decade later, it was a G-20 summit that helped mobilize the global response to the 2008 financial crisis, generating commitments of over one trillion dollars in government spending to restore credit, growth and jobs. As a forum including both the traditional 20th century powers of the West as well as emerging giants of the developing world, it rose as the defining bloc of the post-Cold War order. Its meetings became the top event on the annual geopolitical calendar.

That picture is less clear now. The differences within the bloc and its inability to take on any semblance of an ambitious, collective agenda reflects a deeper drift in international politics. The G-20 has been sluggish in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, even though its countries have secured the vast majority of the world’s vaccine supply. Political differences between countries now drown out shared economic interests, with bloc members bearing their hatchets to Rome.

The G-20′s organizing philosophy — tethered around support for international cooperation and rejection of protectionist policies — has weakened in the face of ascendant nationalists around the world. During his stint in office, President Donald Trump managed to make every G-20 event he attended an arena for angry confrontation and abrasive competition.

The mood may be less testy this time in Rome, not least because Trump is out of power and neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi Jinping are attending in person. Modest wins will include agreements on a notional global minimum tax rate for big companies — though implementing these measures on national levels may take considerable time — as well as pledges to help slash global methane emissions by 30 percent by the next decade. But curbing methane, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently stated, “is the lowest-hanging fruit.”

Far thornier debates over fossil fuels may not be settled. Biden comes to Europe seeking to lead a united front on climate action, but he is hobbled by politics at home, where some lawmakers have eaten away at his ambitious climate plan and defended the interests of major fossil fuel companies. His weakened hand is not aided by major divisions within the G-20 over how to wean the world off coal and what realistic targets should guide the bloc’s climate agenda.