With Joe Biden about to step off the world stage, the jockeying for position has began, with China’s Xi Jinping taking an early lead.
In an instant, Joe Biden saw his future. Standing side of stage, he could only watch as the world moved on without him.
A look of confusion initially crosses his face: US presidents, the so-called leaders of the free world, are accustomed to always being in the spotlight, standing firmly centre stage with millions waiting on their every utterance.
But not on this day.
He seemed resigned to his fate, wryly smiling at Canada’s Justin Trudeau, before wrapping his arm around Italy’s Giorgia Meloni as they walked back from where they’d come.
The three leaders were meant to be on a stage taking part in a photo with the other leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies who had gathered this week in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the G20 summit.
There had been “logistical issues”, was the spin from Biden’s staff, and the photo had been taken too soon. The US president, along with Trudeau, had been late to arrive from a bilateral meeting.
Yet in earlier years a photo like this would have waited for the President of the United States of America, no matter how late he might have been.
It almost seems impossible to consider that now. But the world is no longer the same.
This is a world where Joe Biden is yesterday’s man and his predecessor-cum-successor Donald Trump looms larger than ever. The once-dominant European leaders from Germany, France, the UK, have either exited the arena or are diminished in power compared with when Trump was last in the White House.
Sensing a void in global leadership, China’s Xi Jinping is making his move.
As China rises, Xi has long viewed the US as a fading superpower. Now he has seen his time to pounce. This week we saw him set his route.
Like schoolboys meeting the headmaster
The officials burst out of a room, each carrying a flagpole bearing the Union Jack.
Further down the corridor Britain’s prime minister Keir Starmer had just emerged from the opposite end of the room, having the first talks of this kind for a British leader in six years.
Starmer walks into the middle of a delegation. His eyes are affixed straight ahead and while surrounded by staff, he doesn’t say a word.
Those officials at the other end of the corridor are now rushing trays of water glasses from the room, replenishing new supplies inside.
Minutes barely tick past, the door is closed and there’s quiet again.
Coming from the same direction where Starmer just emerged is another leader: grey haired, bespeckled. It is Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese.
With a delegation smaller than Starmer’s, he too walks in silence, his eyes also trained straight ahead.
The scenes gave the impression of schoolboys being called to the headmaster’s office.
Inside the room sat Xi Jinping.
These meetings were more than just a polite meet and greet.
Xi had a specific goal for his week-long trip to South America: he planned to stitch together a Trump-proof coalition.
Trump loomed large
The meeting of Pacific-rim nations at the Asia Pacific Economic Partnership (APEC) forum in Lima, Peru, this month was always going to play out in the shadow of the US election.
Same, too, for the G20 meeting of the world’s largest economies that met in Rio days later.
Had Kamala Harris won the US presidency instead of Donald Trump, there would have been a collective sigh of relief from America’s Western allies. Instead, Trump’s victory — and the spectre of his return to the White House — loomed large over the meetings in Brazil and Peru.
Trump’s America-first agenda carries threats that could send ripples through economies around the world. Whether it’s promising to impose a 60 per cent tariff on Chinese imports and up to 20 per cent on other nations, his plans to withdraw from international climate targets or his vow to end the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day in office, Trump’s pledges fly in the face of the current world order.
What’s different about the prospect of his second administration is the safeguards that previously existed are no longer.
Domestically, it’s well established criticism that this time around there are fewer “grown-ups in the room” with steady government experience. His appointments this week to his future cabinet this week have only reinforced that.
But internationally, a similar dynamic is at play: Trump will face a very different set of global counterparts than those he confronted in 2016.
Germany’s Angela Merkel, the long-serving chancellor, was infamously captured in a photograph leaning over a table where Trump sat with his arms crossed like a petulant child.
The image served as a metaphor for how Merkel’s leadership extended far beyond German and European borders. She proved successful in keeping Trump’s worst instincts contained.
Her successor, Olaf Scholz, never warmed to such a role.
France’s Emmanuel Macron sought to fill the leadership void Merkel left, but has been greatly diminished in the years that followed.
Add in Britain’s revolving door of prime ministers and the Western world suddenly finds itself looking leaderless.
So while Americans voted for their president, the rest of the world now faces the consequences of that election that delivered Trump’s win without the strong voices that might have once kept him in check.
Enter, Xi Jinping.
Power imbalance
There’s rarely a level playing field when a leader meets Xi. In most cases, they travel to him.
This is exactly what was happening in Rio, when Starmer and Albanese paid visits to the beachside Sheraton hotel that Xi and his four-figure delegation had taken over.
The hotel was flanked by armoured military vehicles and security guards as far as the eye could see. Supporters, too, stood outside the hotel, and lined streets around Rio, wearing white caps with the Chinese flag on them. Some were also waving large Chinese flags.
It’s these overt displays of power that the leaders visiting Xi have to navigate, where the imbalance is established long before they even get into the room with him.
The Starmer-Albanese parallels extend beyond just appearances.
They’re Labor, or in Starmer’s case Labour, leaders who have returned their party to government after long periods of conservative rule, periods that have seen relations with China break down.
Starmer sees improved relations with China as a way to reignite the sluggish British economy.
Albanese, too, saw the need to repair relations with China as one of his top priorities when he took office in 2022.
In his two years in power, the Albanese government has overseen the removal of around $20 billion in trade tariffs that China had imposed on Australia in response to a series of government decisions – from foreign interference laws, to accusations about Chinese cyber hacking and Australian calls for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19.
Albanese doesn’t talk about repairing Australia’s relationship with China as foreign affairs, or bilateral relations as the diplomatic speech goes. He frames it as jobs – working-class jobs that were otherwise at risk if Australia wasn’t on good terms with its largest trading partner.
But with Trump heading for the White House in weeks, things have changed.
Sitting opposite Xi, Albanese could be forgiven if he didn’t at first believe the words coming out of the Chinese leader’s mouth: Without a drop of irony, Xi urged Albanese to oppose protectionism, to support free trade.
Here was a man who years earlier had launched a vindictive assault on Australia, seeking to use economic coercion to force a nation state to bend to his will. The then prime minister Scott Morrison remained resolute. So too did Albanese when Labor came to power.
Adopting his mantra of “cooperate where we can, disagree where we must”, Xi’s Goliath blinked first as Australia’s David stared the giant down.
Seeking a coalition against tariffs — and Trump
Summit season in South America meant leaders attending APEC in Peru needed to spend a week in Latin America, book-ending their trips with the G20 meeting in Brazil.
Right from his first day in Lima, Xi was sending strong signals of his intentions.
Joining with Peru’s president Dina Boluarte they made for quite the pair. Xi’s power in China is unrivalled, having firmly established himself in the presidency for life. Boluarte recently scored a 92 per cent disapproval rating. Engulfed in corruption scandals, a Lima local pointed at where they thought Boluarte would eventually be headed – to a women’s prison. But on this day, she stood with Xi as they opened a $5.3 billion Chinese-controlled mega port north of the capital.
The opening happened via video link, in part because of the protest fears that surround Boluarte. Ahead of APEC she was rarely seen outside her brick mansion.
Not that Xi seemed concerned. The port opening wasn’t about Peru, it was about China.
“We are witnessing… the birth of a new land-sea channel between Asia and Latin America in the new era,” Xi declared.
The Chinese leader showed little regard for group meetings while in South America, snubbing APEC’s first day schedule to instead meet one-on-one with other leaders.
There was a theme that ran through his meetings, even if the name Trump was never uttered. As he had with Albanese, Xi urged leaders to support open trade, to oppose isolationism and protectionism.
He was seemingly stitching together a global coalition of leaders who could push back should Trump follow through on his trade war threats.
For Albanese, he wasn’t parroting those lines because Xi asked him, they’re the lines that Australian leaders irrespective of party have long championed – even in the face of Xi’s anti-free trade actions in recent years.
Looking into the void
Meanwhile, Joe Biden had a close look directly into the void that his impending retirement offers.
There was no US president on the stage as a photo of world leaders was being taken.
Instead Xi stood in prime position. Also prominent were India’s Narendra Modi and, two rows back, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.
Four years earlier, Indian and Chinese forces clashed in a deadly battle along the disputed Himalayan border. And in a further sign of how much the world has changed since Trump was last in power, Xi and Modi met on the sidelines of a BRICS+ summit in Russia last month.
Initially formed between Brazil, Russia, India and China, the grouping soon added South Africa. In the past year, another four countries have joined, with Saudi Arabia still considering its invitation. Framed as an alternative to Western dominated institutions, it’s also come to represent the rise of authoritarian strongmen, chief among them Xi, Modi and Russia’s powerful leader Vladimir Putin.
Modi, as was the case again at the G20, proved a skilled politician, seemingly willing to play with both sides of the street.
Modi happily chatted with Biden, as he did with Albanese in formal and informal discussions. But he will soon host Putin in New Delhi, as their nations grow closer economically and diplomatically.
Publicly, China insists it hasn’t sided with Russia and wants to bring peace to Ukraine.
Australia’s National Intelligence Office head Andrew Shearer sees it differently, recently warning Beijing was part of an “emerging axis” with Iran and North Korea to help “kill innocent Ukrainians” in supporting Russia’s war effort.
He warned China was covertly playing a crucial role in keeping Russians in the field of battle, a sentiment NATO has echoed.
In backing Ukraine, Biden, Albanese and other Western allies have wanted to send a message to China, should it be inspired to follow suit and send troops into Taiwan.
They say it’s about upholding a world that follows the rules-based order. But good luck getting that message out of Donald Trump, a man for whom the rules have seemingly never applied.
Yet don’t expect Biden to go quietly into the night.
As he travelled from Lima to Brazil, he stopped in the Amazon rainforest, doing so to urge the world to continue to fight climate change. On the same day, he gave authorisation for Ukraine to fire US-made long-range missiles into Russia.
If world leaders meeting in South America this week were seeking to ring-fence global efforts to tackle climate change and protect free trade, Biden looked to be doing his own Trump-proofing around the White House, futile as it might become on January 20.
Middle power, great
Anthony Albanese wasn’t born for the world stage.
He is a lifelong Labor man, better suited to counting numbers in the caucus than delivering a barnstorming address to his global peers. It’s telling that he has not felt compelled to speak at the UN in his first term in office.
In his private moments Albanese will concede it’s become easier to attend the kinds of summits he’s just spent a week at. He’s eager to position Australia as a middle power that could use its relationships with the US and China to help prevent a global trade war breaking out.
That looks to have been welcome news in Beijing. Landing in Peru, Albanese was greeted with an editorial in Chinese state media that lauded him as a model for other Western nations to follow.
Xi spoke of the progress he and Albanese had made, noting the “turnaround” in relations that had resulted after years with “twists and turns”.
But the Chinese made clear it was a relationship Albanese must treat with “great care”.
Starmer, in that meeting with Xi before Albanese’s time slot, had a taste of what happens when you make comments that sit at odds with what Beijing wants to hear.
Chinese officials bundled reporters from the room when Starmer sought to raise human rights concerns in brief public comments ahead of their closed-door meeting.
That’s not the approach Albanese has sought to pursue, and in return he’s seen the removal of tariffs and the release of detained journalist Cheng Lei.
When he held his first press conference in Lima, Albanese approached the microphones sporting brogues, his favoured orange Hermes tie, and a suit that looked to be from the same Italian designer that Paul Keating liked to wear.
He spoke of the hope he had for middle power nations and the role they could play as the superpowers look to be squaring off.
Pointing to the informal MIKTA group, Albanese stumbled, unable to recite the countries involved.
By the trip’s end a few days later, the brogues had been packed away, replaced by Australian-made RM Williams boots. He grinned as he recited the names of the MIKTA countries – Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey and Australia – who met together on the sidelines of the G20.
Albanese has spent an important week advancing Australia as a safe and reliable trading partner and an emerging green energy superpower eager to capitalise on the spoils that could come from Trump’s plans to dump Biden’s climate action.
Without saying as such, the approach Albanese used with China looks likely to be used again with Trump. He will work with Australia’s closest security ally where he can, but he’s not willing to bend on the values Australia holds on climate and trade.
The prime minister returned to Australia having performed well on the world’s stage.
But in eight weeks Trump will be back and everything will change once again – just as Albanese starts his own trial-by-angry-electorate when the election campaign kicks off.
As Biden prepares to leave an empty seat at the table, there will be more than one super-sized ego trying to fill it.
Credits
Words: Brett Worthington
Visuals: Michelle McNamara, AP, Reuters
Editor: Catherine Taylor
