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Trump Says He Talked Trade With Theresa May and Still Plans to Visit London World Leaders Move Forward on Climate Change, Without U.S.
(about 4 hours later)
HAMBURG — A day after a closely watched meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Trump on Saturday said he was working with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain on a date to visit London, after the two held what he called “tremendous talks” on trade. HAMBURG, Germany — World leaders struck a compromise on Saturday to move forward collectively on climate change without the United States, declaring the Paris accord “irreversible” while acknowledging President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement.
Mr. Trump met with Mrs. May on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit conference of the world’s major economic powers in Hamburg. It was the final day of the gathering, where the differences between the United States and the other 19 nations on trade and climate change have been on vivid display, and protesters set fire to cars and looted in the streets of the German city the night before. In a final communiqué at the conclusion of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, the nations took “note” of Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the pact and “immediately cease” efforts to enact former President Barack Obama’s pledge of curbing greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
“Nothing’s easy,” Mr. Trump said of the gathering on Saturday as he complimented its host, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who has been toiling to bridge the gap between the United States and other nations, for handling the challenge “so professionally.” But the other 19 members of the group broke explicitly with Mr. Trump in their embrace of the international deal, signing off on a detailed policy blueprint outlining how their countries could meet their goals in the pact.
One prominent example was on climate change, where Ms. Merkel succeeded on Saturday in brokering compromise language between the United States — which Mr. Trump has withdrawn from the Paris accord to reduce global carbon emissions — and the other 19 nations that will declare in the G-20 communiqué that the agreement is “irreversible.” The statement and the adoption of the G20 Climate and Energy Action Plan for Growth ended three days of intense negotiations over how to characterize the world’s response to Mr. Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, and it came as this year’s meeting of major world economies here laid bare the stark divide between the United States and the rest.
While Mr. Trump abhors multilateral trade agreements, he is enthusiastic about the bilateral sort. He said that he and the British prime minister had developed a “very special” relationship and were at work on “a very powerful” trade agreement that could be completed “very, very quickly.” “This is a clear indication that the U.S. has isolated itself on climate change once again, and is falling back while all other major economies step up and compete in the clean energy marketplace created by the Paris Agreement estimated to be worth over 20 trillion dollars,” said Andrew Light, a senior climate change adviser at the State Department under Mr. Obama.
It is not clear what the president meant about the timing, since the two sides cannot complete such an agreement until after Britain leaves the European Union, in March 2019 at the soonest, most experts say. Differences between the United States and other nations on climate, trade and migration made for a tricky summit meeting, which unfolded amid large protests that sometimes turned violent, with several injured and demonstrators setting fire to cars and looting in the streets of the German city.
Amid speculation about whether Mr. Trump would visit London, since Mayor Sadiq Khan has asked him to stay away and there has been concern about huge protests should he appear, the president confirmed he still planned to visit. “Nothing’s easy,” Mr. Trump said of the gathering on Saturday as he complimented its host, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who has toiled to bridge the gap between the United States and other nations, for handling the challenge “so professionally.”
“I will be going to London,” he told reporters. Hours later, at the start of a high-stakes meeting with President Xi Jinping of China, Mr. Trump vowed to confront the threat posed by North Korea “one way or the other,” and said he appreciated the Chinese leader’s efforts to respond to Pyongyang’s latest provocations.
Further details on the timing and circumstances of the visit were not immediately available. The White House and Downing Street had earlier dismissed news reports that Mr. Trump was considering a quick visit to Britain on his way back to the United States from the G-20 meeting. “It may take longer than I’d like, it may take longer that you’d like, but there will be success in the end, one way or the other,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump was also bracing for a tense meeting with President Xi Jinping of China later Saturday in which North Korea’s escalating provocations, including the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile, were to be the main focus. The wording on climate change in the communiqué represented a much-needed victory for Ms. Merkel, who played a major role in forging compromise language after France raised objections.
The president, who initially bonded with Mr. Xi at an April meeting at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., has grown frustrated at the Chinese leader’s response to the North’s behavior, arguing that China must use its influence — including economic ties — with Pyongyang to calm tensions and help pave the way for nuclear disarmament talks. In most other respects, though, the summit meeting had to be a bitter disappointment for the chancellor. When the meeting was first planned for Hamburg, Ms. Merkel’s birthplace, she would have reasonably expected Hillary Clinton to be the American president, and she had expected the event to be a strong part of her re-election campaign for a fourth term, with voting in September.
Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, said on Friday that China’s willingness to pressure North Korea to date had been “uneven.” But Mr. Trump tends to suck all the media air out of a room, even in Germany, where he is deeply unpopular. This summit meeting was always going to be primarily about Mr. Trump and his first meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“China has taken significant action, and then I think, for a lot of different reasons, they’ve paused,” Mr. Tillerson told reporters. “We’ve continued to make that clear to China, that we would prefer they take the actions themselves, and we’re still calling upon them to do that.” It has also been about efforts by most of the rest of the world to cajole the American president into softening his stances on global trade and the climate, with Ms. Merkel in a secondary role, trying to come up with compromises.
Also on Saturday, United States officials said that Mr. Trump would direct the State Department to steer $50 million from its foreign-aid budget to a new international public-private partnership to aid midsize businesses run by women that his daughter Ivanka Trump helped create. Her standing has also suffered as Germans have been shocked by violent protests by a small bloc of anarchists who saw the G-20 as a perfect platform for their rejection of capitalism and order.
The partnership, the World Bank Group Facility for Women Entrepreneurship, aims to “help women in developing countries gain increased access to the finance, markets and networks necessary to start and grow a business,” a spokesman for Ms. Trump said. The atmosphere around Hamburg has been that of an armed camp, hardly welcoming, with 20,000 police officers asking for further reinforcements to try to protect the various leaders here. So far, 213 police officers have been injured, and 43 people have been arrested and 96 more detained.
The contribution comes as the Trump administration considers a drastic scaling-back of foreign aid as part of the president’s “America First” campaign pledge to target federal funding to creating jobs at home. His budget, released in April, but largely ignored on Capitol Hill, would include deep cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, a major conduit for foreign assistance. The central city has been shut down. There is no taxi or bus service, trams are often blocked by protesters and the subway is overcrowded. The area around the conference center is ringed by riot police officers while helicopters fly overhead and police sirens scream around various motorcades.
The president planned to announce the formation of the fund at an event with the World Bank Group president, Jim Yong Kim, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany later on Saturday. Some shops were looted and cars were burned, and the smell of burning tires wafted over the conference center. Even Melania Trump could not leave her guesthouse on Friday to join a spousal tour of the harbor.
There were conflicting accounts, meanwhile, of what had transpired when Mr. Trump raised the question of Russian meddling in the 2016 United States presidential election during his meeting with Mr. Putin on Friday. Mr. Trump, who said he and the Russian leader had a “tremendous meeting” on the G-20 sidelines, ignored a shouted question about whether the Russians had misrepresented their conversation. Ms. Merkel expressly backed the 100,000 or so peaceful demonstrators who massed here in recent days and were marching on Saturday. She may have been hoping to show authoritarian leaders like Mr. Putin and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, how to tolerate protests in a democracy. If so, she and the security forces failed, losing control in the part of the city where Ms. Merkel was born in 1954, weeks before her parents moved east to Communist Germany.
While Mr. Tillerson said Mr. Trump had pressed Mr. Putin on the matter, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said that Mr. Trump had accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of any interference and that Mr. Trump had spoken of the issue being “exaggerated” by some people in the United States. So this was always going to be risky for Ms. Merkel, and Mr. Trump’s presence has only intensified what were widely anticipated to be widespread and sometimes violent demonstrations against globalization, even though Mr. Trump is a sharp critic of globalization.
Negotiations on climate change language had bogged down as the United States pressed for a reference to its efforts to stay engaged in the issue now that it has withdrawn from the Paris climate accord and France voiced objections. Whether the criticism of holding the summit meeting here will hurt Ms. Merkel in the September elections is not clear. Her popular conservative finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, appeared on national television on Friday night strongly defending the decision. Only large cities like the picturesque Hanseatic port have sufficient infrastructure to host the thousands of leaders, delegates, journalists and lobbyists who gather at a G-20 meeting, he said.
The final document notes that while the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, “the leaders of the other G20 members state that the Paris Agreement is irreversible.” The substitution of the somewhat weaker term “state” for “agree,” as it was in the first rendering, was a concession to the Trump negotiators. And some diplomatic work has been done at the summit meeting, even beyond Mr. Trump’s own meetings and his hyperbolic praise of every leader he meets, whatever his private views, including Ms. Merkel (“You have been amazing and you have done a fantastic job.”)
So, too, it seemed, was much of the rest of the passage concerning the United States, which says: “The United States of America states it will endeavor to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently and help deploy renewable and other clean energy sources, given the importance of energy access and security in their nationally-determined contributions.” Working overnight, diplomats first agreed on a common text on trade, with a nod toward Mr. Trump’s “America First” demands for restrictions on unfair trade, but had great difficulty on climate, with the Americans demanding a reference to the use of fossil fuels.
While the conference was wrapping up, a mass demonstration was planned by civil society groups. That would follow violent protests on Friday night by anticapitalists and anarchists that by early Saturday had left Hamburg’s Schanze district with shattered storefronts and the remnants of the smell of fire hanging in the air. The trade section in the statement the aides thrashed out read: “We will keep markets open noting the importance of reciprocal and mutually advantageous trade and investment frameworks and the principle of nondiscrimination, and continue to fight protectionism including all unfair trade practices and recognize the role of legitimate trade defense instruments in this regard.”
The demonstrations were brought under control only after German police called in special forces to stop the burning of cars and looting. The climate section is more of a dodge. It takes note of the American decision to withdraw from the Paris accord and says the other countries nonetheless regard the deal as “irreversible.”
Officials said that overnight, about 1,500 protesters had taken over the streets of Hamburg’s leftist district, where there is a tradition of protests and clashes with the police. In recent years, the area had been gentrifying, with more middle-class residents moving in, making the district an even more attractive target for the anticapitalist protesters. It then nods toward fossil fuels, saying: “The United States of America states it will endeavor to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently and help deploy renewable and other clean energy sources, given the importance of energy access and security in their nationally determined contributions.”
Hours after Mrs. Merkel hosted the leaders in the port city’s elegant Elbe Philharmonic Hall to hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, plumes of smoke rose from the center of the city as the protests escalated. The police said some 500 protesters had looted a supermarket and set it on fire. Mr. Trump, who spent so much time with Mr. Putin on Friday that he delayed meeting the British prime minister, Theresa May, until Saturday, tried to fortify her delicate political fortunes. He said that they had had “tremendous talks” on trade and were working on a “very powerful” trade deal for a post-“Brexit” Britain that could be completed “very, very quickly.”
Videos posted on social media showed the smashed glass of a looted Apple store, while another showed masked demonstrators clad in black plundering a grocery store. Other images showed masked protesters being chased by helmeted, heavily armed police officers against a backdrop of flames and smoke. It is not clear what Mr. Trump meant, since the two sides cannot sign such an agreement until after Britain leaves the European Union, in March 2019 at the soonest.
The authorities said the protesters were armed with homemade incendiary devices and iron bars. Activists said the authorities had turned water cannons against them more than 20 times on Friday. Each side reported injuries among their ranks, including at least 14 people who were hospitalized. At least 83 people were arrested, officials said. Mr. Trump also confirmed that he would eventually make a state visit to Britain, but the dates continue to be unclear. Mrs. May conveyed the invitation from Queen Elizabeth II within days of Mr. Trump’s inauguration, but there are likely to be significant protests whenever he visits.
A local Budniskowsky supermarket was broken into and pillaged, with its contents emptied or destroyed and graffiti lining the walls. Also on Saturday, American officials said that Mr. Trump would direct the State Department to redirect $50 million from its foreign-aid budget to a new international public-private partnership to aid midsize businesses run by women, a group that his daughter Ivanka Trump helped create.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Cord Wöhlke, the owner of the chain, who added that he aimed to begin repairs on Monday and reopen the store on Wednesday. The partnership aims to “help women in developing countries gain increased access to the finance, markets and networks necessary to start and grow a business,” a spokesman for Ms. Trump said.
By morning, residents were taking over their streets, cleaning up trash and assessing the situation. Piles of charred trash, bicycles and a refrigerator lay heaped on the sidewalk. Dozens of shop windows — even those that had been taped with “No G20” and other slogans — hung in shards. The contribution comes as the Trump administration considers a drastic scaling-back of foreign aid as part of Mr. Trump’s “America First” campaign pledge to target federal funding to create jobs at home.
His budget, released in April but largely ignored on Capitol Hill, would include deep cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, a major conduit for foreign assistance.