Politics

Cameras Off: G7 Summit Heralds the Return of In-Person Diplomacy


PLYMOUTH, England — Call it the much-welcomed death of Zoom diplomacy.

President Biden and six leaders from the world’s richest nations are meeting — face-to-face — in a picturesque, seaside resort in Cornwall, on England’s southwestern shore. It is the first in-person global summit meeting since the coronavirus pandemic shut down travel and forced presidents and prime ministers to reach for the “raise hand” button, just like everyone else.

So far, proximity appears to be working in favor of cooperation.

Summit meetings are always full of prepackaged “deliverables,’’ but stage management always works better when there is an actual stage. So as Friday’s summit opened, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, who is not only hosting the gathering but lured most of the royal family to a formal dinner, announced that the Group of 7 nations would collectively donate one billion doses of coronavirus vaccines to the developing world.

It was a very conscious effort to show that the world’s richest democracies can catch up with China’s moves to establish itself as a leader in the fight against the coronavirus. The G7 pledge includes Mr. Biden’s promise to deliver 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

But as the leaders gathered in hastily built meeting rooms just feet from a sandy shore, they were acutely aware that beyond the humanitarian gesture lay a big geopolitical move, coming as more than 260 million doses of China’s Covid-19 vaccines have been sent to 95 countries, according to Bridge Consulting, a Beijing-based consultancy.

The leaders gathered in Carbis Bay in Cornwall have also agreed, at least in concept, to Mr. Biden’s proposal for a 15 percent minimum global tax to keep corporations from engaging in a race to the tax-burden bottom. And the group appears poised to issue a unanimous embrace of tougher emissions goals ahead of a major climate change summit this year.

This week, the one-at-a-time meetings ended.

Mr. Biden jetted across the Atlantic for an eight-day in-person round of global backslapping and private confrontations. On Friday, he attended the first day of a Group of 7 meeting with the leaders of the world’s richest nations. Then comes a full meeting of NATO leaders, and of the European Union, before the trip’s main event: a one-on-one face-off with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of face-to-face diplomacy,” said Madeleine Albright, who served as secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.

“On the Zoom, you have no kind of sense of their movements and how they sit and various things that show what kind of person you are dealing with,” she said. “You can’t judge what’s going through their minds.” (The Munich conference, she noted, is “a perfect setting for him,” referring to Mr. Biden.)

Richard Haass, a lifelong diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, agreed that face-to-face meetings are better than the alternative. “I will leave to others to assess the diplomatic implications of Zoom only requiring leaders to be formally clothed from the waist up,” he said.

But Mr. Haass warned against reading too much into “face-to-face meetings or personal diplomacy in general.”

“Leaders are motivated by what they see as their own and their country’s interests,” he said. “Diplomacy is a tool for advancing those interests, not for dispensing favors.”

Mr. Haass noted that “a face-to-face encounter can also give a leader too much confidence. Khrushchev erred when he concluded too much from his initial meeting with J.F.K. and later overplayed his hand, in the process bringing the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe,’’ during the Cuban Missile Crisis.



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