G20: leaders will ignore history at world’s peril

A clash of personalities between the leaders of the great powers was an inevitable outcome of the meeting of G20 heads in Hamburg.

US President Donald Trump assured it with his Poland speech marking out the contemporary existential battle over Western values and whether the will existed to protect them.

The drama has not been helped with the backdrop of violent clashes between police and protesters on the streets of the host city.

Not surprisingly, some officials are now talking of potential war on two fronts — global trade or conflict on the Korean peninsula.

There can be little doubt that this is shaping up as one of the most fractious meetings of the G20 since its inception.

What was first established as an economic forum, the 2017 summit has become a focal point for a range of increasingly bitter global divisions. At the centre of those divisions are the US, China, Russia and Europe.

The question is where the US under the Trump presidency will sit in relation to the foremost geopolitical and geo-economic issues facing the world, whether it be North Korea, Syria, economic isolationism, climate change or, as he suggests, the fight for the survival of Western civilisation.

Every country represented here, including Australia, has skin in the game and a sovereign interest in the outcome.

As one G20 official said, history is a better predictor of things than Twitter. As the saying goes, history is the butcher’s bench. History suggests that the precursors for conflict are real. The analogy has been drawn, not for the first time, with the seminal tome The Guns of August.

A pivotal question was posed by the author Barbara Tuchman about the outbreak of war in 1914.

The great powers of the time did little to prevent it, yet none could sufficiently explain why. Sleepwalking towards catastrophe.

It is a metaphor again being used, a century later.