Times of Israel:
AMBURG, Germany (AFP) — US President Donald Trump won key concessions on climate and trade Saturday from world leaders at the most fractious G20 summit to date, in exchange for preserving the unity of the club of major industrialized and emerging economies.
In a final statement agreed by all 20 economies, 19 members including Russia, China and the European Union acknowledged Trump’s decision to go his own way on taking the US out of the 2015 Paris climate accord.
But they also accommodated Washington’s wish to “work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently.”
While renewing a key anti-protectionist pledge, the communique for the first time underlined the right of countries to protect their markets with “legitimate trade defense instruments.”
Such wording gives room for Trump to push on with his “America First” policy.
Carried on a wave of public fury over de-industrialization in vast areas of the United States, Trump had promised to “Buy American” and “Hire American.”
But that stance had set him against many of America’s allies, who warned Trump against an isolationist path.
Nevertheless, the wording of the final agreement marked the group of top economies’ decision to finally close ranks despite bitter differences.
Just behind the tightly secured G20 summit venue, charred road barricades, trashed shops and stones, debris and shattered glass bore testimony to an anarchic night, when police commandos with semi-automatic weapons detained people who hurled rocks from rooftops.
The clashes had blocked US First Lady Melania Trump at her residence on Friday, forcing her to miss a tour of Hamburg harbor, and for G20 organizers to completely alter a program for spouses of visiting leaders.
On Saturday, thousands of anti-riot cops were on standby and helicopters hovered overhead, as some 70,000 people were on the march again, according to organizers.
Within the summit walls, meetings have also been anything but harmonious.
All eyes were also on Trump’s diplomatic waltz during the billionaire’s first outing to the summit.
His most eagerly awaited encounter was a head-to-head with Russia’s strongman President Vladimir Putin — their first — which lasted two and a quarter hours on Friday.
Take the Paris Accord and run it through the paper shredder along with the rest of those Useless Nations Treaties
I think it’s clear that Trump re assumed the position of America as the leader of the economic world, which Obama surrendered back in 09. When the freeing up of the handcuffs the liberals had put on America, we are becoming the ‘spot’ in the world for new manufacturing operations, having the lowest energy costs in the world.