World leaders are making final preparations for this week’s G20 summit in Argentina on Friday and Saturday. The meeting, which is being billed as the moment when US-China trade tensions could come to a head, may become the most important G20 since the 2009 meeting in London during the storm of the international financial crisis. Leaders will be in attendance from the United States, China, Germany, India, Japan (which will be the G20 president next year and host the event in Osaka), Indonesia, Australia, Russia, Brazil, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, South Korea, Argentina, Mexico and the EU. Collectively, these powers account for some 90 percent of global GDP, 80 percent of world trade and around 66 percent of global population. Last year’s summit in Hamburg was most memorable for the divisions within the G20 powers, especially the United States and key EU countries, over issues such as international trade, migration and climate change. To be sure, there was not complete disagreement in these areas with all parties, for instance, acknowledging the importance of limiting global temperature rises to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, given US President Donald Trump’s rejection of the Paris accord, significant differences were aired over the means to secure this ambition, and he ultimately was isolated 19-1 on this issue. Another flashpoint was the collision between German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s push for a strong G20 re-affirmation of international trade, versus Trump’s victory in securing language in the end-of-summit communiqué that countries can protect their markets with “legitimate trade-defence instruments”. This same topic is also likely to be central to this year’s meeting narrative, with Beijing and Washington having been locked now for several months in what could descend into a trade war, with Trump imposing tariffs of some $250 billion and China retaliating with some $110 billion of duties. Last week, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said he foresaw a confrontation between Washington and Beijing at the G20 after a growing war of words after the APEC summit earlier this month. This year’s forum could be especially memorable given the possibility of Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping securing a breakthrough in US-China trade tensions Andrew Hammond On Thursday, Trump expressed optimism again that a breakthrough could potentially be reached with China before Jan. 1 when a new round of US tariffs commences that will increase duties to 25 percent on a broad range of consumer goods. Yet for that to happen, Trump is clearly looking for more negotiating carrots from Beijing after he asserted earlier this month that a list of 142 concessions offered was “not acceptable.” The potentially escalating US-China spat comes at a difficult time for the international trading system, with G20 countries applying around 40 new trade restrictive measures between May and October, covering around $481 billion of trade, the World Trade Organization (WTO) said last week. Three-quarters of the latest trade restrictions were tariff hikes, many of them retaliation to steel and aluminium tariffs imposed by Trump in March. The new restrictions were the largest since the WTO started specifically monitoring G20 trade in 2012. The massive amount of attention on this year’s G20 highlights, yet again, that the body is widely perceived since the 2008-09 financial crisis to have seized the mantle from the G7 as the premier forum for international economic cooperation and global economic governance. It is now a decade since the G20 was upgraded from a finance minister body to one where heads of state now meet too – a move that was greeted with considerable fanfare, including from then-French-president Nicolas Sarkozy, when he claimed that “the G20 foreshadows the planetary governance of the 21st century.” Yet the fact is that the forum has failed so far to realize the full scale of the ambition some thrust upon it at the height of the international financial crisis. A key part of the failure to deliver is that the G20 meetings have no formal mechanisms to ensure enforcement of agreements by world leaders. There also remains concerns by states outside the G20 about the club’s composition, which was originally selected in the late 1990s by the United States along with G7 colleagues. While countries were nominally selected according to criteria such as population, GDP etc, criticism has been made of omissions such as Nigeria, sometimes called the “giant of Africa,” which has three times South Africa’s population. Former Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Store has gone so far to call the G20 “one of the greatest setbacks since World War Two” inasmuch as it undermines the UN’s universal sense of multilateralism. Reflecting this, the UN General Assembly convened a rival UN Conference on the Global Economic Crisis in 2009 as an alternative forum. Taken overall, while the G20 has not yet lived up to some of the initial expectations of it, it continues to be a forum prized by its members as the session in Argentina will show. This year’s forum could be especially memorable given the possibility of Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping securing a breakthrough in US-China trade tensions. Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics. Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point-of-view