The G20 may be a talking shop, but that’s better than the alternative

If Rishi Sunak had to skip one global summit before Thursday’s autumn statement, it would have made more sense for him to miss the G20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia, this coming week, than the United Nations climate conference in Sharm el Shaikh, Egypt, last week.

As it is, he changed his mind about the climate summit and so will be attending both. The rationale for going to Sharm el Sheikh was clear: it was to follow up the commitments made at the previous climate summit in Glasgow, presided over by the UK’s representative. It was a chance for Mr Sunak to emphasise Britain’s continued leadership role on the path to a low-carbon world – a symbolic message that was unfortunately muffled by his initial intention to give the summit a miss.

The rationale for the G20 meeting is less obvious. The main point of the G20 is as a wider forum for economic coordination than the G7. The G20 was commandeered to some effect by Gordon Brown as UK prime minister in 2009, after the financial crisis. That was when it ceased to be a mere talking shop, and became a practical means of coordinating policy among countries representing three-quarters of the world’s population. That summit, in New York, did a great deal to restore global economic confidence.

Since then the G20 has been fitfully useful, although the centre of gravity has shifted back towards the smaller group of seven leading nations. But now the G20 has a fundamental flaw, which is that many of the world’s economic problems are caused by one of its members launching a war of territorial expansion in Ukraine. Russia, which for a while was admitted to the G7, making it the G8, is still a member of the G20, and can exercise a veto over any declaration that the group might make.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has decided not to attend, but Sergei Lavrov, his foreign minister, will take Moscow’s chair. That means the summit meeting can say nothing of any value about the most important problem facing the world’s economy, namely the high price of oil and gas caused by Mr Putin’s war.

Unsurprisingly, some of the pre-briefing from Western capitals is about how their leaders will demand of Mr Lavrov in no uncertain terms that his boss should do the decent thing and end his war. Downing Street sources suggest that Mr Sunak will use one-to-one meetings with other leaders to put pressure on non-aligned nations to back away from Mr Putin. But this is not a conference about the war in Ukraine, and if there are back-channel talks going on about how the war can be brought to an end, they are likely to be taking place elsewhere.

That said, it is always better that world leaders talk to each other face to face rather than strike poses at a distance and, even if there can be no agreed communique because Mr Lavrov would veto any criticism of the Russian government, there can be useful discussions in the margins and at official level, especially about trade.

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For Mr Sunak, the main event will be his meeting with Joe Biden – their paths did not cross in Sharm el Sheikh. The prospect of a US-UK trade deal is as remote as ever, but their meeting will be a chance to put the Northern Ireland negotiations on a sounder footing. Mr Biden did not have much time for Boris Johnson’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, of which the US administration is a guarantor. He and Mr Sunak are more likely to find common ground.

The hoopla of international summitry is usually accompanied by joint statements of lowest-common-denominator platitudes, so it will be no great loss to skip a communique this time. But jaw-jaw is always better than the alternative. If Mr Sunak had said he was not going to Bali, he should have changed his mind about that, too.