After so many splashy summits, President Obama’s decision to hold this year’s Group of Eight (G8) meeting at Camp David is inspired. The success of leaders-level meetings depends, above all, on opportunities for candid conversation away from media flashbulbs and crowded convention halls. The secluded setting—nestled in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains—will provide a welcome intimacy to deliberations among leaders of the world’s advanced market democracies. Given their daunting global agenda, they can certainly use the peace and quiet. Read more »

After emerging from the 2008 financial crisis relatively unscathed, Brazil’s inevitable entrance into the club of major global powers is increasingly accepted. The Internationalist and Carlos Simonsen Leal of the Brazilian Getulio Vargas Foundation discuss Brazil’s perspective on global finance and international security. Simonsen says: Read more »

As host of this year’s Group of Twenty (G20) summit, the Mexican government is diligently finalizing the agenda that world leaders will consider in Los Cabos (June 18-19). Earlier this week I was in sunny Mexico City, helping advise Mexico’s G20 sherpa, Deputy Foreign Minister Lourdes Aranda, on summit priorities. I did so as part of a new “Think20” network of think tank experts from around the world—the brainchild of the Canadian Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). The consultation, cohosted by the Mexican Foreign Ministry and the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations (COMEXI), offered a rare chance to weigh in on the future of the world’s “premier forum for global economic coordination.”  The G20 has a tall task ahead of it, and needs to focus its agenda. Here’s the Internationalist’s take on its priorities for Los Cabos: Read more »

Terra Lawson-Remer explores the important question of how the G20 can improve its legitimacy and effectiveness. Lawson-Remer is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and assistant professor at the New School University. She was formerly senior advisor for international affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Lawson-Remer holds a JD and PhD. Read more »

Meeting last weekend in Los Cabos, Mexico, for their first, “informal” gathering, G20 foreign ministers made a pivotal decision: to expand the G20 agenda to encompass pressing political and security matters. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister, emphasized that on crucial issues that “affect the lives of billions…the international community is failing,” and announced that the group would reconvene at the G20 leaders’ summit from June 19 to 20 to consider a raft of global issues ranging from transnational crime to green growth and food security. Read more »

This weekend, foreign ministers from the Group of Twenty Nations (G20) will meet in Los Cabos—the first such meeting in a group which has been dominated by finance ministers and central bank governors since its inception. With foreign ministers at the table will the G20, like the G7 and G8 before it, expand its remit to address a broader suite of global challenges? Read more »