{"id":16952,"date":"2014-11-19T06:00:33","date_gmt":"2014-11-18T19:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=16952"},"modified":"2014-11-20T08:22:43","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T21:22:43","slug":"the-delights-of-summitry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-delights-of-summitry\/","title":{"rendered":"The delights of summitry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"G20<\/a>On the evidence of APEC, the East Asia Summit and the G20, anyone who decries summitry as a waste of time, talent and money either has a narrow view of the world or is extremely hard to please. To take just one of the players\u2014but what a player\u2014Xi Jinping in the space of a week has deeply delighted Oz and deeply shocked the Abbott government.<\/p>\n

The delight was the consummation of a free trade deal a decade in the making. The shock was a climate change agreement with the US in which Canberra was surprised by Xi and blindsided by Obama. What more can you ask from summitry? Thrills, spills, twists and dramatic plot shifts\u2014and this column isn\u2019t even going near Putin.<\/p>\n

The successive summits hosted by China, ASEAN and Australia produced a blizzard of images and ideas, driven by power, policy and personality. Tracking power is about the trend lines and how the narratives are sold.<\/p>\n

The intense burst of summitry offers all sorts of stories. Come on a quick dance through some bits that matter to Oz. This tour is a communiqu\u00e9-free frolic. Not to dismiss the formalities\u2014merely that power flows from summitry in lots of ways:<\/p>\n