U.S. President Joe Biden aims to seize on the absence of two key adversaries at this week’s Group of 20 leaders meeting in New Delhi to make fresh inroads with countries that China and Russia have previously courted.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping both opted to skip this year’s gathering, giving Biden an opening to re-establish the U.S. as the polestar of the international system. He’ll take the U.S. case to nations such as Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia — not to mention the host, India — that are eager for closer ties with China and have declined to take sides after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Central to that effort is a push to boost the funding and scope of the World Bank and other development banks, in a bid to deepen ties with the world’s emerging economies and offer an alternative to China’s state-backed lending. The U.S. also plans to push for debt relief for poor countries and announce funding for new infrastructure projects. Biden will then visit Vietnam to announce commercial deals deepening ties with the country’s emerging technology sector.