Trump’s eight biggest challenges at the G-20 summit

While protesters fill the streets of Hamburg on Friday outside the G-20 summit, President Trump will be inside meeting with more than a half-dozen world leaders during a day that will test his mettle on the international stage and shape ways the U.S. responds to a number of foreign policy crises.

Trump’s highly anticipated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin consumed much of the intrigue surrounding the annual gathering of the world’s largest economies in the days leading up to the G-20.

But Trump faces far more questions than simply whether he will mention Russia’s attempts at election meddling when he meets Putin face-to-face for the first time since becoming president.

Here are eight issues leaders will discuss Friday at the G-20 summit.

Border wall

Trump’s first bilateral meeting of the day will square him with a leader who canceled their last scheduled encounter: Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Although the two planned to speak in Washington shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Pena Nieto canceled the meeting in response to Trump’s insistence that Mexico pay for a border wall separating the U.S. from Mexico in fulfillment of a 2016 campaign promise.

The Mexican government has signaled that Pena Nieto does not expect to see any major agreements arise from his meeting with Trump. However, the border wall will likely be a topic of conversation between the two leaders.

Election meddling

Trump will face tremendous pressure back home to confront Putin about Russia’s role in hacking Democratic inboxes and distributing unflattering emails during the presidential race.

Steve Sestanovich, senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University, suggested Trump’s ability to tackle other problems with Russia will depend on whether he can put the election meddling question to rest.

“Obviously the election-meddling issue matters most in the U.S., but it would help the president enormously on other matters to show he can begin to get past it. It’s a huge weight on his ability to handle relations with Russia,” Sestanovich said.

Trump raised eyebrows on Thursday when he said during a news conference in Poland that he believed other countries may have been involved in the election-era hacks. The president has previously acknowledged Russia’s likely role in the cyberattacks, but has stopped short of condemning the Kremlin for them.

“I don’t see how he can put it behind him unless he tackles it head-on. Being cute about how it ‘might have been’ Russia won’t do the job,” Sestanovich said. “He needs to say to Putin that foreign interference in our elections is unacceptable, that we won’t allow it, and Russia will not benefit from trying it. And then, after the meeting, he needs to say that he told Putin this.”

Trump reportedly plans to bring Secretary of State Rex Tillerson into the room when he sits down with Putin for a bilateral meeting on Friday.

However, Sestanovich noted, Putin has a history of peeling leaders away from their aides during formal meetings.

“The president’s advisers obviously hope to stay in the room with him for the meeting. But what will they say if Putin says to Trump, ‘Mr. President, may I have a word with you privately?'” Sestanovich said. “That has happened many times in such encounters — and the private word can go for hours!”

North Korea

Pyongyang’s successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile earlier this week could inject a fresh sense of urgency into discussions about how countries can counter North Korean aggression.

Trump is likely to approach the issue with both Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday.

“On North Korea, Russia has played a role a lot like China — endorsing sanctions at the UN, then not implementing them very aggressively,” Sestanovich said.

The president has already warned Egypt to observe sanctions against North Korea, including by ending its practice of hosting North Korean guest workers. He raised concerns about Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions during a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday and will likely lean on other world leaders to abide by all current or future U.N. resolutions filed against North Korea.

Although Trump’s strategy for reining in North Korea has involved a heavy reliance on China to intervene with the hermit kingdom, Trump has begun to signal his impatience with China’s lack of progress. He took to Twitter earlier this week to express his frustration over the growth in trade between China and North Korea over the last quarter.

Paris climate agreement

Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, who will both attend the summit on Friday, have criticized Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.

Critics of the move, which fulfilled one of Trump’s campaign promises, have argued that the president weakened U.S. influence abroad by walking away from the table on such a major international issue.

That assertion will be put to the test on Friday when Trump confronts a room full of leaders who signed on to the sweeping climate accords. The summit will serve as the first opportunity to gauge how much Trump’s exit from the Paris deal will factor into American relationships with countries that fully back the agreement.

Syria

Tensions in Syria have steadily climbed since Trump took office and recently reached a near-boiling point when the U.S. shot down a Syrian government plane in mid-June.

Russia, which backs Syrian President Bashar Assad, threatened to shoot down U.S. and coalition jets that wandered west of the Euphrates River in the wake of the incident.

Trump called out Russia over its support for the Assad regime on Thursday in a major speech he delivered shortly before leaving Warsaw for Hamburg. The president could press Putin Friday on his activities in Syria and his silence on Syrian chemical weapon attacks.

Trade

Trump’s protectionist approach to trade could come face-to-face with Merkel’s globalist approach on Friday at the G-20 summit.

Trump has long advocated for bilateral trade deals over multilateral ones that Trump has argued leave the U.S. at an economic disadvantage. However, his administration is reportedly open to negotiating a trade deal with the European Union, which would enter a trade agreement as a bloc.

Trade may also factor prominently into Trump’s discussions with Pena Nieto, as Mexico, Canada and the U.S. are slated to begin renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement later this year.

Trump has accused several countries of acting in bad faith when trading with the U.S. Notably, he threatened during the presidential race to label China a currency manipulator, but backed off the threat in an effort to coax China into curbing North Korea’s nuclear activity.

With China’s progress on North Korea stalled, it is unclear whether Trump will begin to take a harder line against China on trade.

Ukraine

Russia’s continued presence in Ukraine is likely to loom over talks at the G-20.

Trump described Russia’s activity in Ukraine as “destabilizing” during his speech in Warsaw on Thursday. Although Russia agreed to stop meddling in Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin continues to back Ukrainian separatists and has not relinquished Crimea, a Ukrainian territory Russia annexed.

Trump and Merkel on Thursday discussed the need to pressure Russia into honoring the Minsk Agreements, which were created to fix the situation in Ukraine.

NATO allies have long viewed Russia’s annexation of Crimea as a threat, and former President Barack Obama drew criticism for his failure to do more to push back on Russia at the time and in the years since.

Qatar

The diplomatic crisis in Qatar has escalated in recent weeks, with Trump coming down on the side of the Gulf and Arab countries that have worked to isolate Qatar over its alleged funding of terrorism

G-20 leaders are likely to discuss ways to ease regional tensions before they bubble into an armed conflict.

Qatar was one of the top three issues Merkel and Trump discussed in the hours before the G-20 summit began on Friday.

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