Ominous arguments

On the eve of a G20 summit designed to coordination the responses of the major world actors to the largest economic crisis since the 1930s, the difficulty of actually forging agreement both between the established and emerging powers and within the developed democracies themselves has been on painful display in the past few days.

A spat in the South China Sea both demonstrated the importance of military coordination between the US and China, and the more prosaic regional issues on which such cordination will in the first instance be based. At talks last weekend, piracy and Afghanistan were on the agenda, but until the can work out and agree on their respective roles within East Asia the potential for instability will be ever-present.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and chair of the Eurozone finance ministers, Jean-Claude Junker, summed up the attitude of many European countries when he contemptuously dismissed US proposals for increased and coordinated stimuli as "not to our liking". NATO countries continue to refuse to offer extra troops to serve in Afghanistan. If the transatlantic community cannot agree on common positions, it is hard to see how they will succeed in bringing the developing world on board.