Transcript
LAEL BRAINARD: This is the first time I think since 2001 that the G-8 leaders will have the luxury of focusing on the kind of core globalization agenda rather than being preoccupied with the security crisis du jour, which has really been the main preoccupation of the last few years.
The G-8 always has this kind of two tracks. It has a set of activities and deliverable that they are working on on a longer-term basis, and then they frequently get side swiped at the last moment by some kind of regional or security crisis. Well, that doesn't look likely to happen this year, and that is a double-edged sword. It puts tremendous onus on producing concrete results.
The last time that was true, as you may recall, was the first year of the Bush Presidency and the meeting ended without making any progress at all on the central issue of climate change. Tony Blair, for his part, has gambled his G-8 presidency on two very ambitious targets: first, on climate change, which David will talk about; and secondly, a massive increase in economic assistance, economic trade with Africa.
He has portrayed this meeting at Gleneagles as the first of two steps on the way to U.N. General Assembly, which will be squarely focused on where we are in the Millennium Development Goals, and he wants to use this to deliver concrete results.
My prediction is that President Bush is not going to give him everything that he needs to deliver a home run for Tony Blair at Gleneagles on either subject. And I think it's partly due to very political landscape surrounding the two leaders. Blair has enormously energized constituencies on these sets of issues, and the same is simply either just not true for President Bush or, in some cases, he actually has strong political support going in the other direction.
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