America’s Last Chance With the Global South

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The United States is failing in the global South. Its popularity and influence have waned, and policies that recent U.S. administrations have designed to close the gap have fallen short. Allegations of hypocrisy that countries in the global South now make—centered on the claim that the United States has supported Ukraine but has been complicit in mass death and suffering in Gaza and Lebanon—reflect historic skepticism that Washington’s advocacy for international norms reflects a commitment to humanitarian principles rather than self-interest, and a growing perception that developing countries bear the cost of uneven U.S. leadership. The disproportionate struggle that many global South countries faced in recovering economically from the Covid-19 pandemic only added to their disappointment with advanced economies’ so-called vaccine nationalism. The United States’ rejection of free trade has shrunk sought-after market access opportunities, while new industrial policies raise fresh hurdles. As a result, despite making significant strides in its economic and strategic engagement with the global South, the United States faces a trust deficit.

Countries in the global South have attempted to press the United States for better engagement in multilateral forums. But addressing the trust deficit through these postwar institutions has not been effective, because they have become part of the problem. They have failed to adapt to a new distribution of power, fueling charges of hypocrisy and breeding competitive multilateralism. Antagonistic alternatives—from the expanded BRICS to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—are vying for influence. Neither American nor Western leadership is the only game in town, and more than ever, the United States must earn its partnerships with rising powers such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia.

Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election has further raised the stakes. He has vowed to pursue a more unilateral, “America first” foreign policy, championing aggressive economic policies that will buffet emerging markets, antagonizing allies, partners, and adversaries alike, and threatening mass deportations while inveighing against immigrants with dehumanizing language. But Trump will not be able to ignore the global South’s collective demands. The markets and materials that these countries possess will only become more central to solving problems that the incoming president expresses great interest in addressing, such as bolstering U.S. supply chains and securing critical minerals. For the rest of the world, the participation of the global South is increasingly crucial to tackling challenges that Trump tries to ignore, such as climate change and global health crises.

The Trump administration’s success, and the success of administrations that follow, will depend on crafting a strategy that offers genuine partnerships and mutually beneficial opportunities—one that does not reduce the rest of the world to a playing field for countering China’s influence. If Trump keeps up his inflammatory rhetoric and pursues divisive policies, he may only spur more efforts by global South countries and emerging institutions to hedge against the United States in ways that damage U.S. interests.

If his administration can temper its approach, however, it will find a golden opportunity to reap many benefits. In 2026, the United States will assume the G-20 presidency (over China’s objections). This will provide Washington with a unique platform to start rectifying its relationship with the global South: as a multilateral forum that includes the most influential developing countries, the G-20 is becoming an ever more powerful vehicle for brokering deals, advancing shared agendas, and positioning the United States as a problem solver on thorny challenges such as sustainable development, the reform of multilateral institutions, digital connectivity, and energy cooperation. The United States simply cannot afford to botch its G-20 presidency. Its competitiveness, prosperity, and security depend on it.

CENTER STAGE The G-20 offers a compelling stage for renewed U.S. leadership. Spanning six continents and representing nearly 80 percent of global GDP, the forum includes today’s most powerful states—U.S. partners and allies, as well as adversaries—and has the potential to drive momentum for establishing standards and norms around cooperation on global public goods. Although the G-7 remains an important forum for facilitating international cooperation, it now excludes too many vital partners to anchor an inclusive U.S. global governance strategy. Its primacy has waned: its members’ share of global GDP has fallen by a third since the end of the Cold War, even as G-20 members’ share has held steady. And Trump’s second term threatens to undermine the smaller forum’s greatest strength: cohesion around shared values.

The United States has a strong history of leadership in the G-20. President Barack Obama, along with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, made it a critical forum for international economic coordination during the global financial crisis. But as the United States prepares to chair the body once again nearly two decades later, it faces a different geopolitical landscape. Indeed, since the United States last headed the G-20, in 2008, competition to lead the global South has exploded. New states such as China, Brazil, and India are casting themselves as alternatives to bankrupt Western leadership. Other multilateral institutions, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS, have grown in size and ambition, adopting measures to erode, circumvent, or compete with existing Western-led structures, such as the BRICS’ New Development Bank and its proposed digital currency.

Meanwhile, Americans today are less convinced that their tax dollars should be spent on bolstering their country’s preeminence worldwide. Washington must therefore not only offer a more attractive value proposition to its overseas partners. It must demonstrate at home why developing a better strategy for engaging the global South matters.

KEEPING MOMENTUM America’s G-20 presidency will follow an unprecedented stretch of presidencies that advanced new priorities and propelled meaningful prospects for reform. Used wisely, a state’s 12-month presidency can set the agenda on key global issues, shape international norms, and spur collective action. Critics of the G-20 are quick to point out that its members have competing and diverse national interests. But that is becoming its strength: the G-20 has a comparative advantage in conferring legitimacy to collective action in an era when many global South states feel that the G-7 is no longer fit for purpose and efforts to reform the UN Security Council’s membership have hit a brick wall.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesia’s 2022 presidency highlighted the need for equitable recovery and emphasized issues related to global health and green and digital transitions. Last year, India leveraged its presidency to advocate reforms in multilateral institutions, calling for “bigger, better, and more effective” multilateral development banks (MDBs) as well as measures to unleash $200 billion in new lending. Throughout its presidency, India specifically sought to elevate the global South’s collective leadership abilities, emphasizing collaboration with Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa and welcoming the African Union as a permanent G-20 member with U.S. President Joe Biden’s support.

This year, Brazil has likewise prioritized MDB reform and other issues important to the global South, such as sustainable development, poverty, hunger, inequality, and reforms in global governance institutions, including at the UN. South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has committed to pursuing similar goals during his country’s 2025 presidency, including reinvigorating multilateralism; reforming the global architecture for governance, finance, and trade; and accelerating efforts to meet the UN’s sustainable development targets.

The U.S. presidency in 2026 should follow these examples. It is no secret that Trump distrusts multilateral forums, and his counterparts should not harbor any illusions that he will abandon that worldview. But the United States must prepare for a successful G-20 presidency not despite, but because of, Trump’s aspirations for American prosperity and security. In addition to representing some 88 percent of the world’s population and over 40 percent of global GDP, global South states provide fast-growing international markets and strong geopolitical partnerships. India has emerged as a significant global power, displacing the United Kingdom in 2022 as the world’s fifth-largest economy. Africa is home to 24 of the world’s 25 fastest-growing countries, and Asian countries now represent the majority of global GDP and some 60 percent of this year’s growth, much of it coming from emerging economies.

WAKING UP For the United States to gain the trust it needs to reap the benefits of enduring relationships with these countries, it must foster a more robust and inclusive international order with institutions that facilitate cooperation and provide more evenly distributed benefits. The international order today looks far less liberal than it did even a decade ago, and the consequences are falling on the most vulnerable. Climate catastrophes and wars are displacing tens of millions of people, and the Covid pandemic brought the first jump in global poverty in decades, increasing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 23 million from 2019 to 2022.

Global South countries crave a trustworthy partner. Their optimism that China can offer good-faith partnerships has largely evaporated. Through a combination of coercion and inducement, China has sought to simultaneously expand its geopolitical clout and mitigate its domestic overcapacity challenges by expanding its engagement with the global South. Eleven years after it initiated its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing is still pursuing such efforts abroad, although its priority avenues have shifted. In the first half of 2023, China signed over 100 BRI-related agreements, together worth $43 billion—about a 20 percent increase from the first half of 2022. Some global South countries still welcome Chinese investment, but Beijing’s selective cooperation—as represented by its “wolf warrior” diplomacy and its truculence in debt negotiations—has only heightened wariness of its intentions and trustworthiness. At present, however, developing countries lack adequate access to U.S. markets or viable alternatives to Chinese investment, so their choices are limited.

U.S. policymakers have woken up to the need for action, but with mixed results. Most recently, the Biden administration conducted a series of high-level visits to global South nations, renewed the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, and invested in new formats to engage partners, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the nascent Atlantic Partnership, which includes 42 countries from Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and the Caribbean. It has also sought to mobilize capital to narrow the immense global infrastructure gap—$15 trillion to provide basic infrastructure by 2040 and $64 trillion to achieve net zero by 2050—through mechanisms including the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI).

But U.S. policy has been unable to deliver adequate economic offers. Some would-be partners are being hit hard by Washington’s embrace of industrial policy and rejection of traditional trade agreements. Although recent U.S. policies have featured bright spots, such as technology diplomacy and novel agreements such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the benefits of such policies have so far been limited, and partners continue to lament the United States’ reluctance to make commitments to digital trade, including its refusal to join 80 countries in signing an e-commerce deal negotiated this summer at the World Trade Organization. The United States has also persistently limited its remaining avenues for engagement to those focused on countering Russia or China. Stressing great-power rivalries may be a way to sell policies in Washington, but it cannot convince states across the global South of the value of U.S. leadership.

MULTILATERAL TRUST The absence of fresh economic offers from the United States, combined with Trump’s promise of new tariffs, could more deeply alienate global South partners. During Trump’s first term, however, he seemed to recognize, at least in part, the global South’s importance to U.S. strategy. In 2019, his administration launched Prosper Africa, an initiative to increase U.S. trade and investment with the continent. That same year, the administration partnered with Australia and Japan on the Blue Dot Network, an effort to boost high-quality infrastructure investment, but it was soon sidetracked by the pandemic.

The G-20 presidency offers a chance for the Trump administration to build on these gestures. Drawing on the forum’s broad and varied composition, the administration can leverage the G-20 as the anchor of a strategy to increase prosperity for the global South and the United States alike by driving new investment, unleashing economic opportunity, tackling big infrastructure projects, and leading the reform of ossified global institutions rather than bashing them. Since the United States will be assuming the G-20 presidency during Trump’s second year in office, it can offer a well-timed opportunity to demonstrate progress on salient issues in the global South and leave ample time to follow through.

Engineering a global South strategy with the G-20 at its center starts with low-hanging fruit: avoiding incendiary remarks and inflammatory policies that alienate would-be partners. Steering clear of blanket tariffs, mass deportations, or invasions of friendly states is a low bar but an important one. Trump’s appointments to date indicate that he may stick to these plans, but given many foreign capitals’ low expectations of a Trump presidency, they may welcome even modest efforts to rein in fringe voices in his camp.

Establishing a focused global South agenda in 2025 could ensure that by the time Washington assumes the G-20 presidency, it will be able to not only signal its commitment to developing countries but also show results. Trump relishes playing the dealmaker, and during his first term, he often made major threats but settled for minor concessions. His second term offers an opportunity to use economic statecraft more affirmatively to drive more effective outcomes. By embracing diplomacy, participating in reform, and unshackling U.S. economic tools such as financing for development and exports, the next administration and Congress could lay the groundwork for a global South strategy that gives U.S. interests better access to new markets, while also driving forward high-impact projects and local development prospects.

The United States cannot afford to botch its G-20 presidency. An important first diplomatic step could be a high-profile visit to a global South country in 2025, following Biden’s planned visit to Angola in December. The United States must also embrace diplomacy in international forums—not just the G-20, but also the Quad and the Atlantic Partnership. Multilateral institutions will outlast Trump’s presidency, and he could exert greater influence on their work by leading reform efforts than by inveighing against them. Some Trump advisers, influenced by Project 2025, may advocate withdrawing from international financial institutions, but doing so would be a historic error. Trump can help shape the direction of those institutions as a leading shareholder, for example, by building a relationship with Ajay Banga, the pragmatic businessman leading the World Bank. The expiration of Banga’s five-year term in 2028 will offer Trump the option to renew his nomination and build on a U.S.-led reform agenda. Although the Trump administration may not prioritize developing novel tools and directing robust funding to speed the green transition, at the very least Congress and the administration can fund existing U.S. commitments, send qualified representatives to the MDBs, and play a good-faith role in improving their efficacy.

The most significant, inclusive body through which to pursue a broader set of multilateral reforms is the G-20. The forum can take a leading role in reforming the MDBs, and the Trump administration should start by implementing the recommendations of the Independent Expert Group appointed under India’s G-20 presidency to scale up financing, improve private capital mobilization, and enable transformational investments.

Many avenues for improving U.S. policy toward the global South await action in Washington. Crucial tools, especially for galvanizing private capital, have remained untapped in a historically unproductive Congress. The Trump administration’s priorities should include reauthorizing the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and expanding its capacity. The reach of the U.S. Export-Import Bank would also improve with reforms to raise its statutory default limit, exempt certain classes of loans, and to focus on export value and job creation. Extending and updating the African Growth and Opportunity Act, scheduled to expire in 2025, is another opportunity for engagement that would provide duty-free access to the U.S. market for certain exports from over 30 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These agencies and programs are not altruistic giveaways; they are essential economic tools that undergird U.S. economic and national security and help American businesses and workers.

At the same time, the United States must keep its earlier promises. This includes taking further action toward targets set by the PGI and helping ensure the success of its funded projects rather than rejecting them because of their ties to the Biden administration. Another attractive outlet could be the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, a megaproject unveiled at last year’s G-20 summit but delayed by the war in Gaza. If revived after a cease-fire, this connectivity effort could attract significant private investment in addition to advancing geopolitical goals. Although they are clearly subordinate to urgent humanitarian imperatives, the economic and political opportunities provided by the IMEC could offer yet another incentive to push for a durable resolution to war in the Middle East and dovetail nicely with normalization efforts.

SELLING THE G-20 If the Trump administration pursues the above agenda, the United States will be poised to gain ground in the global South. But updating its international strategy is only half the battle. Washington must persuade Americans that working with a wider group of potential allies and partners is in the United States’ interest. India’s effort to build domestic support for global leadership by mounting a G-20 road show—encouraging popular participation by creating festival pavilions and scheduling lectures, meetings, and other events in dozens of Indian cities—provides a useful model. The United States can channel and improve on this effort by launching a nonpartisan publicity campaign grounded in the country’s strengths and diversity—for instance, by holding a road show that visits both rural and urban communities to make a targeted case for an effective G-20 presidency. Trump may be one of few salespeople who can sell the G-20’s potential to broad swaths of the United States.

Trump should embrace such a campaign. The G-20’s immense purchasing power offers opportunities for U.S. businesses and workers. From energy innovation to agricultural technology and exports, the U.S. economy stands to gain from the power that the G-20 wields to focus priorities and encourage investment on a global scale. Safeguarding the United States’ supply of crucial goods and inputs demands cooperation across the G-20 countries and the global South.

There are also normative arguments for the United States to prioritize the G-20. By using the forum wisely, Washington can press for joint technology norms and standards to ensure an open and secure digital infrastructure and stronger affinities between the United States and younger democracies such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa. The pandemic upended Trump’s first presidency, demonstrating that cooperation is essential to tackling pandemics, climate-induced migration, and other global threats. Trump’s legacy will depend on his success in preventing another global catastrophe from putting a black mark on his second term.

Trump’s vituperative persona, his enmity toward multilateralism, and his extreme policy agenda could easily sink the United States’ prospects for meaningful leadership of the G-20. But letting the opportunity pass would be a grave mistake. The global South’s growing ambitions make it imperative that the United States embrace new avenues of collaborative leadership. Even Trump should recognize this and take advantage of the unique opening the G-20 presidency provides to mend distrust of the United States and find a way to appeal to countries it cannot afford to lose.

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America’s Last Chance With the Global South

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