Diplomacy Ain't What It Used to Be, Vol. G-20 Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Just ten years ago, a President's first trip to Europe involved meetings with a (smaller) NATO and EU, with maybe a token stop in a formerly Soviet bloc country.  If you want evidence of how much the trappings of power, and some actual power, have diffused, look at the breadth of leaders Obama will be seeing in Europe -- to say nothing of the breadth of issues those meetings are the venue for discussing.

Over at bloggingheads, Dan Drezner and I embarrass ourselves by failing to name all 20 participants in the G-20.  Quick, can you?  Answer in the click-through.  (Then we go on to discuss the G-20 and trade at thoughtful length, animated by his calling me a protectionist and me calling him a Marxist, which is our effort to imitate the -- non-thoughtful -- way debates on those issues usually play out.) 

Got that one?  How many countries participated in today's Afghanistan conference in the Hague?  More than 80, and I'm not typing them all in.

Is it Joe Nye who used to talk about Americans playing checkers while others played three-dimensional chess, or is that a Tom Friedmanism?  In any case,

 US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, Russia, China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Argentina, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea.  Plus representatives of quite a number of regional groupings and international organizations.

Yes, the UK, Germany, France and Russia -- especially Germany and Russia -- still dominate, or dominate more than ever when the EU is weakened as it is right now.  But the smaller countries, and countries outside Europe, have gained enough formal power, or power over formalities -- or their ability to denounce power structures has gained meaning, maybe that's the best way to put it -- that the G-8 has been supplanted by the G-20 to confront the economic crisis.  You don't hear nearly as much about meetings "at four" and "at seven" as you used to.  And somehow a contact group for Afghanistan swells to take in nearly half of the world's countries.

What's also worth noting is that the UN is participating in all these meetings but not hosting or sanctifying them.  Inclusion in a meeting that's not at the UN is somehow more meaningful -- which flows some from the habits of US ad hoc-ery which the Bush Administration heightened but didn't originate; some from the UN's own weaknesses, which are many; and some, let's face it, from everyone's longing to join exclusive, up-to-the-minute clubs.

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