Talks about terrorism and bloody events in the Middle East diminished to open the way for extensive discussions on developments in trade and protectionist policies at the 2016 Hangzhou Summit in China.
The Saudi delegation at the summit was headed for the first time by the Saudi Crown Prince, Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, who was then the Deputy Crown Prince, second deputy-prime minister and minister of Defense.
Chinese President Xi Jinping announced during a press conference at the end of the two-day meetings that the leaders of the world’s largest developed and emerging economies had agreed to support the multilateral trade exchange system and address protectionist policies.
Jinping stressed that relying on monetary and tax policy to stimulate growth was not enough, calling for restarting the growth engine through innovation. He also revealed that the G20 has adopted specific guidelines for managing growth policy, describing it as “the first global framework for joint investment rules.”
In July 2017, the leaders of the twenty largest economies gathered at the G20 summit in the German city of Hamburg. The meetings brought the climate agenda back to the forefront. The disagreements at the time between US President Donald Trump and his European counterparts were so great and sparse that the G20 summit agreed in the final declaration on one common point related to combating terrorism in its general sense.
The US president came to Hamburg a few weeks after announcing his country’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, which his predecessor Barack Obama had joined two years before and was considered by France and the United Nations as an achievement in the fight against climate change.
