Slate- "Who Needs the U.S.? The G-19 Might Be Here to Stay."
by Joshua Keating
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/07/10/who_needs_the_u_s_the_g_19_might_be_here_to_stay.html
Last week’s G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, ended with a pledge from what’s being called the G-19—that is, the group of 20 major world economies minus the United States—reaffirming that the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement is “irreversible.” The nickname may stick: The summit seemed to indicate that other world powers are determined to unite against the Trump administration’s erratic isolationism.
As my colleague Susan Matthews has argued, while the administration’s climate denialism is tragically misguided, if that denialism is going to be the U.S. policy, it actually may not be the worst outcome for the U.S. to pull out of the deal and let the other signatories get on with it, rather than spending years negotiating and watering down the agreement’s commitments to suit Trump’s whims.
Climate policy is not the only area where we seem to be entering a G-19 era. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the event’s host, said in a magazine interview prior to the summit that, “It is, for example, open whether we can and should in the future rely on the US investing so much as it has so far in the United Nations’ work, in Middle East policy, in European security policy or in peace missions in Africa.” She continued: “The US will probably not engage in Africa to the extent that would be necessary, particularly since they barely have oil interests any more in Africa and the Arab world.”
Three days later, this indifference was illustrated by Trump’s daughter Ivanka, an unpaid adviser with unclear responsibilities, taking his place during a meeting on Partnership With Africa, Migration and Health, a major breach of protocol that also underlines how seriously Trump takes those issues.
snip - read on at the above link