A Group of 20 leaders’ summit in South Africa adopted a declaration addressing the climate crisis and other global challenges yesterday after it was drafted without US input in a move a White House official called “shameful”.
The declaration, using language to which Washington has been opposed, “can’t be renegotiated,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesperson told reporters, reflecting strains between Pretoria and the Trump administration over the event. “We had the entire year of working towards this adoption and the past week has been quite intense,” spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said.
Ramaphosa, host of this weekend’s gathering of Group of 20 leaders in Johannesburg, had earlier said there was “overwhelming consensus” for a summit declaration.
But at the last minute Argentina, whose far-right President Javier Milei is a close ally of US President Donald Trump, quit the negotiations right before the envoys were about to adopt the draft text, South African officials said.
“Argentina, although it cannot endorse the declaration ... remains fully committed to the spirit of co-operation that has defined the G20 since its conception,” its foreign minister Pablo Quirno said at the summit. Ramaphosa noted this, but went ahead with it anyway.
In explanation, Quirno said Argentina was concerned about how the document referred to geopolitical issues.
“Specifically it addresses the longstanding Middle East conflict in a manner that fails to capture its full complexity,” he said. The document mentions the conflict once, saying members agree to work for a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace in ... the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
Envoys from the G20 – which brings together the world’s major economies – drew up a draft leaders’ declaration on Friday without US involvement, four sources familiar with the matter said.
“It is a longstanding G20 tradition to issue only consensus deliverables, and it is shameful that the South African government is now trying to depart from this standard practice,” a senior Trump administration official said on Friday.
The declaration used the kind of language long disliked by the US administration: stressing the seriousness of climate change and the need to better adapt to it, praising ambitious targets to boost renewable energy and noting the punishing levels of debt service suffered by poor countries.
The mention of climate change was a snub to Trump, who doubts the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by human activities. US officials had indicated they would oppose any reference to it in the declaration.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In opening remarks to the summit, Ramaphosa said: “We should not allow anything to diminish the value, the stature and the impact of the first African G20 presidency”. His bold tone was a striking contrast to his subdued decorum during his visit to the White House in May, in which he endured Trump repeating a false claim that there was a genocide of white farmers in South Africa, brushing aside Ramaphosa’s efforts to correct his facts. Trump said US officials would not attend the summit because of allegations, widely discredited, that the host country’s black majority government persecutes its white minority.
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