Top nations' discord could leave the world rudderless

Top nations' discord could leave the world rudderless

Fallout over Ukraine may have dire consequences

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Russia has managed to be the talk of the Nuclear Security Summit here even without the presence of President Vladimir Putin.

The crisis in Ukraine has pushed the already-dysfunctional Group of Eight to the edge of collapse. Some fear it could lead to a "G-Zero" world with no concerted leadership -- a risk in itself.

British Prime Minister David Cameron told the U.K. Parliament Wednesday that the G-8 should consider expelling Russia from the group permanently. When G-8 leaders, minus Putin, held a meeting Monday, no one mentioned disbanding, but the group is clearly on the brink.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, standing in for Putin at the nuclear summit, scoffed at such talk.

"The G-8 is an informal club, with no formal membership, so no one can be kicked out of it," he said.

This year marks three decades since Cameron's predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, welcomed future Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to London, calling him someone with whom she could "do business." This marked a turning point in the Cold War: For the first time, a Western leader had acknowledged the other side as a partner.

The Berlin Wall fell five years later, followed by the end of the Cold War in 1991. Two years after that, Russian President Boris Yeltsin attended a Group of Seven "plus 1" summit in Tokyo, where he beamed at being treated as an equal. The first official G-8 summit was held in the U.K. in 1998.

Now, the post-Cold War international order built up by the predecessors of today's G-8 leaders stands riven. At the urging of U.S. President Barack Obama, G-7 leaders agreed Monday to boycott the G-8 summit that Russia is supposed to host in June to punish Moscow for its intervention in Ukraine.

But they still need Russian cooperation on a host of challenges, from getting Iran and North Korea to renounce nuclear weapons to pursuing Obama's vision of a world without the bomb. Putin knows this all to well.

"If our Western partners believe the (G-8) format has exhausted itself, we don't cling to this format," Lavrov told reporters here. "We don't believe it will be a big problem" if the June summit doesn't take place, he added.

Russia is trying to shift priorities to the Group of 20 and the BRICs, which share economic and other interests. Both groups include China, the world's second-largest economy and a counterweight to the West and Japan.

On the Ukrainian crisis, Obama told Chinese President Xi Jinping at their summit Monday that "China's interest should be in working with us," according to Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser. But Xi refused to be pinned down, insisting on a "fair" approach. China clearly contends that keeping a free hand will allow it to maintain influence on both the U.S. and Russia.

The G-8's lurch into dysfunction follows the decline in American power. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the financial crisis have weakened America militarily and economically. Obama concedes that the U.S. is not the world's policeman.

Unless the G-8 can find a new way to defuse their tensions, the world will remain dangerously exposed to geopolitical risks.

Source: Nikkei Asian Review