US hollows out G20 agenda, casts Miami summit as ‘backdrop for Trump-Xi meeting’: sources

The United States is working to hollow out the G20’s agenda and turn its December summit “into a backdrop” for a likely meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Miami, the South China Morning Post has learned.

Two delegation members described the effort as the group’s top negotiators, also known as sherpas, met in Washington on Monday and Tuesday for their second in a planned series of sessions to draft the Joint Declaration that leaders are to issue at the summit.

They said the US “pressed to strip the text of language on poverty reduction, energy transition and gender” and to narrow the agenda to immigration, transnational crime, terrorism, foreign investment and what it calls “fair trade”.

Both spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations were private.

One said the US had worked since December, when the group first met, to draft language “favouring its own interests over smaller, developing economies”, and described the gathering as something the Americans treated as “a pretty backdrop for a photo of Trump and Xi”.

The SCMP reached out to both the White House and the US State Department, but neither immediately responded to requests for comment.