Leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations gathered in Rome on Saturday for the first in-person Group of 20 summit since the coronavirus swept across the planet, confronting twin global crises that have an outsized impact on the poor: the peril posed by climate change and the continuing failure to provide equitable access to lifesaving vaccines.
“We are now in the second year of a global pandemic that has killed four million people,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, said in a speech before the meeting. “Extreme climate events regularly devastate vulnerable communities.”
“You have come together, to determine the course of some of the most pressing issues we face: access to vaccines; extending an economic lifeline to the developing world; and more and better public finance for ambitious climate action.”
On Saturday, President Biden scored a diplomatic victory at the summit, with leaders endorsing a landmark global agreement that seeks to block large corporations from shifting profits and jobs across borders to avoid taxes. The global agreement to set minimum levels of corporate taxation is aimed at stopping companies from sheltering revenue in tax havens like Bermuda.
“We reached a historic agreement for a fairer and more equitable tax system,” Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy said in remarks opening the summit’s first session.
Other leaders, including Mr. Biden, were expected to offer similarly effusive praise for the deal.
Later in the day, Mr. Biden will meet with the leaders of Britain, France and Germany to discuss ways to get the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran back on track, one of Mr. Biden’s most elusive diplomatic goals since assuming the presidency. They will also wrestle with ways to better unite to address the pandemic.
When the group posed for their “family photo,” they were joined on the platform by doctors in white coats and first responders from the Italian Red Cross.
Before Saturday’s meeting, health and finance ministers from the nations called for 70 percent of the world’s population to be vaccinated against the coronavirus over the next eight months — an ambitious goal that would require a sharp increase in the amount of vaccines made available for the developing world.
It would mean addressing the stark inequity that has resulted in G20 countries receiving 15 times more doses per capita than countries in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the science analytics company Airfinity.
The United States has pledged to donate more than one billion doses, the most in the world. And Mr. Biden, who often refers to his skills as a negotiator and his decades of foreign policy experience, will seek commitments from foreign leaders on other efforts to combat the pandemic.
But the promises of wealthy nations have repeatedly fallen short over the course of the pandemic.
So, too, have pledges by wealthy nations to address climate change. The urgency of the moment has been driven home time and again this year as nations struggled with flooding, fires and other extreme weather events.
The G20 meeting comes just before COP26, a worldwide summit on climate change in Glasgow that could be a make-or-break moment to save a warming planet.
While the gathering in Rome marks a departure from the largely virtual diplomacy of recent years, two leaders are noticeable for their absence: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China — who are staying home from the conference over Covid concerns.
Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters traveling to Rome that the president considered those leaders’ absences not as an obstacle to coordination, but as an opportunity to showcase that Western democracies can work together to meet current and future threats.
Gita Gopinath, the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said the most urgent economic task for leaders at the summit was slowing the pandemic — in large part, she said, by making good on promises to ship vaccine doses to less wealthy nations.
“To truly end this health crisis and its accompanying economic crisis, we need to get to widespread vaccinations everywhere in the world,” Ms. Gopinath said.
ROME — President Biden suggested on Saturday that talks to restart a nuclear accord with Iran, a delicate diplomatic deal struck in 2015 and unraveled by the Trump administration, may move forward.
“They’re scheduled to resume,” Mr. Biden said at the Group of 20 summit, just before he entered a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain to discuss rejoining the pact.
In a hastily released joint statement, the group seemed to put the brakes on Mr. Biden’s assertion that talks would definitely resume.
The statement said the leaders “welcome President Biden’s clearly demonstrated commitment to return the U.S. to full compliance” with the accord and “stay in full compliance, so long as Iran does.”
Mr. Biden’s advisers had said ahead of the summit not to expect a major development on the pact, but the president’s comments seemed to suggest an openness to move forward, if not a concrete step.
In the vortex of global challenges facing the Group of 20 leaders — the tenacious coronavirus, the disrupted economy and the warming climate — the breakdown of talks with Iran represents a less prominent but no less vexing problem for the United States and its European allies.
In the meeting, which was closed to press, Biden and his counterparts were certain to discuss efforts aimed at reviving the 2015 nuclear accord, which Mr. Biden’s predecessor, Donald J. Trump, abandoned in 2018, calling it insufficiently strict.
Under the agreement, Iran sharply curtailed its nuclear activities in verifiable ways, aimed at ensuring that it could not make an atomic bomb, and the United States rescinded some sanctions that had severely crimped Iran’s economy.
Since the U.S. repudiation of the agreement, and the restoration of sanctions, Iran is no longer abiding by its terms, either. According to U.N. monitoring reports, Iran has made significant advances in enriching uranium, the nuclear fuel that can be used for both peaceful pursuits and for weapons. It now has far more enriched uranium than it did in 2018, and has enriched it closer to the very high level needed to make a bomb.
Although Iran has repeatedly pledged that it will never become a nuclear-weapons state, it is believed to be close to crossing an important threshold, having amassed roughly enough uranium for fueling a bomb.
Mr. Biden has said he wants to restore U.S. participation in the agreement. The other parties to the accord — Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia — have been seeking ways to save it.
But talks with Iran on this issue have basically been stalled since the June election of Iran’s hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, who has insisted that the United States return to compliance first, promise to never abandon the accord again and give up any thought of renegotiating its terms.
Biden administration officials have suggested that time is running out to salvage the agreement.
On Wednesday, Iran’s deputy foreign minister said that Iran intended to participate in talks in Vienna on reviving the accord before Nov. 30, but as of this weekend a date had not been set.
Outside experts who have followed the ups and downs of the accord’s history have turned increasingly skeptical about the prospects for saving it.
“Iran’s continued intransigence and the acceleration of its nuclear program will make it difficult for even the most forward-leaning negotiators to revive the agreement next year,” the Eurasia Group, a geopolitical risk advisory firm, said this past week in an assessment written by its Iran analysts.
Several thousand protesters marched in Rome on Saturday afternoon, dancing, drumming and singing “Bella Ciao,” a song identified with the resistance movement during World War II.
And they vented their rage and disenchantment with the current world order: “You are the G20, we are the future,” they chanted, as they wound down a Rome avenue, setting off red and green flares.
At least 5,000 people joined the march, according to police officials, though organizers said the number was more than twice that.
This year is the 20th anniversary of the Group of 8 summit that Italy hosted in the northern city of Genoa that was marred by rioting. It is also a moment of tension between the authorities and opponents of the Italian government’s coronavirus vaccination requirements, which have resulted in violent clashes.
“The level of attention is maximum,” said Giovanni Borrelli, a local government official, adding that 5,500 extra law enforcement officers had been deployed this weekend in response to the protests.
Protesters on Saturday represented a broad range of groups and causes: students and vaccine skeptics, labor union members and climate-change activists, Romans opposing the government health pass required for workers and representatives of groups like Greenpeace and Amnesty International.
“It’s Oct. 30, and it’s super hot. And that scares me,” said Valeria Cigliana, 18, one of the many people voicing discontent over what they see as inaction on climate change. Wearing a T-shirt on a warm autumn afternoon, Ms. Cigliana spoke in front of a banner that read “The alternative to G20 is us.”
That sentiment was expressed time and again by protesters.
Holding a handmade cardboard placard that read “No $ for instruction, no future for the country,” Sara Degennaro, a 20-year-old archaeology student said the G20 leaders did not “represent the concerns we face in our future.”
Naida Samonà , 39, who traveled from Sicily to attend the protest, said, “In a locked-down city behind closed doors, they decide on our skin.” Sicily was ravaged by a cyclone in the past week, she noted. “The climate crisis is happening under my eyes every day,” she said. “We are clearly on the brink of collapse.”
Felipe Gonzalez, 27, who came from Spain to join the protest, was dressed in a skeleton costume and held an inflamed paper planet and a banner that read “Capitalism is death.”
“We are destroying the planet, and the leaders do not do anything to address that,” he said.
Some protesters had optimistic views. Sara Mastrogiovanni, a librarian from Rome, brought her 8-year-old daughter Ambra to the march. “I want her to better understand the world,” she said, adding: “And I want her to see that we all have a right to express our ideas. It’s the only way to arrive at solutions.”
His face streaked with green, Mauro Cioci, a 19-year-old high school student, arrived with friends from Pistoia, Tuscany, to march. Many days, he said, he is pessimistic about what lies ahead. “But on days like today,” he said, looking around at the thousands in the crowd, “I am optimistic.”
Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy officially began the Group of 20 summit of the world’s most powerful nations in Rome on Saturday with a clear rejection of unilateralism and nationalism, which he said were dividing the world in a time of great peril.
He advocated an unapologetically multilateral approach to get coronavirus vaccines to the developing world to set up a fairer global tax structure.
“The pandemic has kept us apart — as it did with all our citizens — and even before, we faced protectionism, unilateralism, nationalism,” said Mr. Draghi, speaking in English at the head of an oval-shaped table of world leaders. “But the more we go with all our challenges, the more it is clear that multilateralism is the best answer to the problems we face today.”
“In many ways,” he said, “it is the only possible answer.”
His remarks were a clear rejoinder not only against the approach of President Donald J. Trump, but also of the two leaders who are not attending the conference in person, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China.
“Going it alone is simply not an option,” Mr. Draghi said.
Mr. Draghi, revered in the European Union for having helped save the euro as leader of the bloc’s central bank, has emerged as a leader on the continent since taking office in February after a political crisis. In his short speech, he set the agenda for the weekend’s talks.
Regarding the pandemic, he said the world could now “finally look at the future with great — or with some — optimism.”
In Italy, vaccinations are well over 80 percent, and Mr. Draghi noted that more than 70 percent of the population of high-income countries had received at least one vaccine dose. That has cleared the way for economic rebounds, he said, in part thanks to a European recovery plan that has allowed countries to “reduce inequalities, promote sustainability” and build “a new economic model.”
But he noted that the poorest countries had a vaccination rate of about 3 percent. “These differences are morally unacceptable, and undermine the global recovery,” he said. Calling for a global vaccination rate of 70 percent by mid-2022, he urged the elimination of trade barriers, the strengthening of supply chains and the local manufacturing of vaccines to make that possible.
President Biden and other world leaders endorsed a landmark global agreement on Saturday that seeks to block large corporations from shifting profits and jobs across borders to avoid taxes, a showcase win for a president who has found raising corporate tax rates an easier sell with other countries than with his own party in Congress.
The announcement, in the opening session of the Group of 20 summit, was the world’s most aggressive attempt yet to stop opportunistic companies like Apple and Bristol Meyers Squibb from sheltering profits in so-called tax havens, where tax rates are low and corporations often maintain little physical presence beyond an official headquarters.
It is a deal that was years in the making and was pushed over the line by the sustained efforts of Mr. Biden’s Treasury Department, even as the president’s plans to raise taxes in the United States for new social policy and climate change programs have fallen short of his promises.
In the session, every national leader expressed support for the global minimum tax, and Mr. Biden emphasized the importance of the deal, a senior administration official said.
The revenue expected from the international pact is critical to Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda, an unexpected outcome for a president who has presented himself more as a deal maker at home rather than abroad.
The agreement was negotiated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with nearly 140 countries signing on. It would impose a minimum 15 percent corporate tax rate in nearly every country in the world and punish the few holdouts who refuse to go along. The O.E.C.D. estimates the accord will raise $150 billion per year globally from tax-fleeing companies.
As President Biden and other leaders gathered on Saturday to discuss plans to protect against future pandemics, health experts and activists say that rich nations are still not doing enough to help people in poor nations survive the current one.
White House advisers said the president would spend his time at this weekend’s Group of 20 summit focused on fixing supply chains, securing a blessing on a global tax deal, and pushing to explore debt relief and emergency financing for poor countries whose economies have been battered by the pandemic.
From the start of the summit, leaders tried to telegraph the importance of ending the pandemic: During a group photo, they were joined on the dais by doctors in white coats and first responders from the Italian Red Cross. Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy, in his remarks opening the meeting, also pointed to the stark disparity in access to vaccines between richer and poorer countries.
While wealthy nations are offering people third vaccine doses and increasingly inoculating children, poor countries have administered an estimated four doses per 100 people, according to the World Health Organization.
Yet although Mr. Biden has promised to make the United States an “arsenal of vaccines” for the world, White House officials tried to manage expectations heading into the summit that there would be any large announcements on vaccine sharing.
Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, told reporters on Air Force One en route to Rome that “the main thrust of the effort on Covid-19 is not actually traveling through the G20.” He said that a virtual summit that Mr. Biden convened in September had set “more ambitious targets” for countries to pledge shared doses of the vaccine.
Although Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to host a meeting of dozens of countries and nongovernmental organizations later this year to secure commitments on vaccine sharing, Mr. Sullivan said the focus for the G20 was on the future.
Mr. Biden said in June that the United States would buy 500 million Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine doses for poorer nations. He followed up in September by announcing an additional 500 million Pfizer doses, along with the promise of an additional $750 million for vaccine distribution, roughly half of it through a nonprofit involved in global vaccinations.
Only about 300 million of those doses are expected to be shipped this year, a number that experts say falls short of the amount needed for meaningful protection against the virus.
“You really have a failure of developed countries’ leadership post-Covid,” said Célia Belin, a visiting foreign policy fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “This is going to have consequences.”
Since arriving in Rome, Mr. Biden has already heard a personal appeal to do more: During a meeting at the Vatican on Friday, Pope Francis pushed the president on the issue, a senior official said after the meeting.
And in an open letter to the G20, the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, urged the leaders of the world’s largest economies to “to help stem the pandemic by expanding access to vaccines and other tools for the people and places where these are in shortest supply.”
Playing host to leaders from around the world, Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy has already had meetings with President Biden, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. But the most delicate may have been one on Saturday afternoon with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
It was only a few short months ago when Mr. Draghi, newly sworn into office but already a leading voice in Europe, called Mr. Erdogan a dictator.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, had just been denied a chair to sit on during an official visit to Turkey, and while the snub upset many around the continent, it was Mr. Draghi who spoke up about it.
“I felt very sorry for the humiliation that European Commission President von der Leyen had to undergo,” Mr. Draghi said during a news conference in April. But then he went further.
“I believe it wasn’t appropriate behavior,” he said, turning his attention to Mr. Erdogan. “With these — let’s call them for what they are — dictators, which we however need to cooperate with,” he said, “one has to be frank in expressing a diversity of views, opinions, behaviors, visions of society.”
Mr. Erdogan responded at the time, accusing Mr. Draghi of behaving with “impertinence and disrespect.”
Since then, the two have talked on the phone about Afghanistan, with Turkey offering support in managing a possible wave of migrants. But on Saturday afternoon they had their first face-to-face meeting since the contretemps.
According to a person with knowledge of Saturday’s conversation, the leaders talked about Afghanistan again. They also discussed Libya, which is important to Italy’s energy needs and security, and where Turkey has emerged as a potentially decisive force among the foreign powers battling for dominance in the Middle East’s proxy war.
The two discussed more granular trade issues as well, with Mr. Erdogan inquiring about Italian companies working on major Turkish infrastructure projects.
No mention was made of their previous tense exchange, the person said. Mr. Erdogan even gave Mr. Draghi a gift, a book about Mr. Erdogan.
The annual Group of 20 summit meeting, which brings together President Biden and other world leaders, is intended to foster global economic cooperation. But with so many top officials in one place, it also serves as an all-purpose jamboree of nonstop formal and informal diplomatic activity.
This year’s meeting takes place in Rome on Saturday and Sunday and is expected to cover issues like climate change, the global supply chain, the pandemic and the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. If the members can reach consensus on such subjects, they will produce an official joint declaration at the end.
Here is a look at what the Group of 20 is and does, and some of the important things to watch during the two-day summit.
What is the G20?
The Group of 20 is an organization of finance ministers and central bank governors from 19 individual countries and the European Union.
In addition to the United States, those countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey. Collectively, its members represent more than 80 percent of the world’s economic output.
Established in 1999 after a series of major international debt crises, the G20 aims to unite world leaders around shared economic, political and health challenges. It is a creation of the more select Group of 7, an informal bloc of industrialized democracies.
Supporters argue that as national economies grow ever more globalized, it is essential that political and finance leaders work closely together.
What is the G20 summit?
Formally the “Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy,” the G20 meeting is an annual gathering of finance ministers and heads of state representing the members.
It bills itself as the “premier forum for international economic cooperation.” The heads of state first convened officially in November 2008 as the global financial crisis began to unfold.
The annual summit meeting is hosted by the nation holding the rotating presidency; this year, it’s Italy.
What happens at a G20 summit?
It is focused on several core issues around which its leaders hope to reach a consensus for collective action.
The goal is to conclude the two-day gathering by issuing a joint statement committing its members to action, although the declaration is not legally binding. But one-on-one meetings can overshadow official business.
BERLIN — When Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany meets President Biden at the Group of 20 summit in Rome this weekend, she won’t come alone: Tagging along will be her likely successor, Olaf Scholz.
The buddy act between an outgoing center-right chancellor and an incoming center-left one is striking even by Germany’s hyper-bipartisan standards: After 16 years of representing Europe’s biggest economy on the international stage and becoming an indispensable figure in global diplomacy, Ms. Merkel is not just introducing Mr. Scholz to the world, but also trying to reassure the world that Germany will remain in safe hands.
The aim, officials in Berlin said, is to signal “continuity” and a “smooth transition of power.”
“The German chancellor is changing, the main governing party is changing, but Germany’s commitment to the G20 is not,” said one senior official who in keeping with protocol cannot be quoted by name.
Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat who beat the candidate from Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Germany’s elections in September, is expected to be sworn in as chancellor in early December. This weekend, he will also join Ms. Merkel in talks with leaders like President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
As finance minister, Mr. Scholz would have accompanied Ms. Merkel to the summit anyway. But inviting him along to private meetings with other leaders constitutes “a historic gesture,” officials said. No departing German chancellor has taken a successor to a summit before, let alone one from a rival party.
Ms. Merkel’s and Mr. Scholz’s double act reflects Germany’s ever more fluid political center, where change and continuity now seem to go hand in hand. His party governed with Ms. Merkel’s for three of her four terms, making him more of an incumbent than a candidate of change.
That continuity will be welcomed in many G20 nations, though Ms. Merkel will not be missed everywhere.
On her way to Rome, the chancellor stopped in Greece, a country whose crippling decade-long financial crisis marked her time in office. “I know I asked a lot from Greek citizens,” Ms. Merkel told a joint media conference with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Friday, referring to a wave of austerity measures imposed on Greece in return for international bailouts. “I was always for Greece staying in the euro,” she added.
Although public sentiment toward Germany has improved over the years, many Greeks still blame Ms. Merkel for years of tax increases and wage cuts. Ms. Merkel herself said recently that the harsh demands she made on Greece were the toughest moment of her 16 years in office.
Gala dinners typically reflect the host’s style, and at the residence of Italy’s president on Saturday evening, world leaders gathered for the Group of 20 summit will receive homemade quality and sober elegance.
After visiting the Baths of Diocletian with Roberto Gualtieri, Rome’s newly elected mayor as a tour guide, the leaders will move to Rome’s highest hill, to the storied Quirinal Palace that has hosted popes, kings and presidents for the past 450 years.
Cold appetizers — pear and goat cheese skewers, and chickpea balls with pistachio purée — will be served before dinner in a grand hall, where guests will sit more than three feet apart in accordance with coronavirus prevention measures.
The table centerpieces will feature autumnal berries and fruits, such as grapes and pomegranates; peonies, a homage to the first ladies; and chrysanthemums, a symbol of peace.
“Imagination, sobriety and elegance is our motto,” said Mauro Piacentini, the garden designer who is in charge of the Quirinal gardens and flowers, as well as the other parks owned by Italy’s presidency.
Guests will dine on dill-marinated salmon with a fennel and orange salad as a starter, followed by a pumpkin and Parmesan risotto. The main course will be sea bass with a vegetable crust, with a few sides: stuffed artichoke, potato stuffed with a smoked carrot cream, and tomato stuffed with a celery cream. Vegetarian and meat-based options will also be available.
Everything was prepared in the palace’s 7,500-square-foot kitchen, second only to the kitchen at Britain’s Buckingham Palace in size.
Fabrizio Boca, Quirinal Palace’s executive chef, said the produce and other ingredients had come from a variety of small producers — when they weren’t harvested directly from the vegetable gardens in the palace’s park or at Castelporziano, the presidential seaside estate about 15 miles south of Rome.
“We represent Italy and its many small producers, its vast selection of foods and beverages,” Mr. Boca said. “We want to make it shine.”
The evening features four types of wine, though Mr. Boca declined to identify them.
“Many Italian producers are generous enough to send us their wines,” he said. “But we try to buy from small producers. Italy has so many. We shy away from expensive ones — it is simply not the palace’s style.”
Last but not least: a tangerine cream topped with chocolate and a pistachio sponge. Dark and white chocolate pralines will be served with coffee.
As the presidents and prime ministers of the Group of 20 nations met in Rome this weekend, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was not among them. Nor was he expected at the climate talks next week in Glasgow, where China’s commitment to curbing carbon emissions is seen as crucial to helping blunt the dire consequences of climate change. He has yet to meet President Biden in person and seems unlikely to any time soon.
Mr. Xi has not left China in 21 months — and counting.
The ostensible reason for Mr. Xi’s lack of foreign travel is Covid-19, though officials have not said so explicitly. It is also a calculation that has reinforced a deeper shift in China’s foreign and domestic policy.
China, under Mr. Xi, no longer feels compelled to cooperate — or at least be seen as cooperating — with the United States and its allies on anything other than its own terms.
Still, Mr. Xi’s recent absence from the global stage has complicated China’s ambition to position itself as an alternative to American leadership. And it has coincided with, some say contributed to, a sharp deterioration in the country’s relations with much of the rest of the world.
Other world leaders were also missing from the gathering in Rome, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Mr. Xi’s absence has dampened hopes that the gatherings in Rome and Glasgow can make meaningful progress on two of the most pressing issues facing the world today: the postpandemic recovery and the fight against global warming.
Mr. Biden, who is attending both gatherings, had sought to meet Mr. Xi on the sidelines, in keeping with his strategy to work with China on issues like climate change, even as the two countries clash on others. Instead, the two leaders have agreed to hold a “virtual summit” before the end of the year, though no date has been announced yet.
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