The US: Out of the picture

Also: Brazil, Australia, the UK, the Baltic, and Sudan.

Shoes, Vincent van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In today’s dispatch:

• UNITED STATES. Biden fades from global leadership.

• BRAZIL. Lula shows his country’s strengths and weaknesses.

• AUSTRALIA. BRITAIN. Xi seeks to fluster Washington’s allies.

• THE BALTIC. Another undersea cable is severed.

• SUDAN. Moscow vetoes a ceasefire to play for a base.

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UNITED STATES. Out of the picture

Biden fades from global leadership.

Joe Biden missed Monday's official G20 summit "family photo", arriving slightly late. Xi Jinping, placed in the front and centre, later circulated among other dignitaries. Earlier in Peru, Xi told Biden he was "ready to work" with Donald Trump.

INTELLIGENCE. Justin Trudeau also missed the event. It’s substantively meaningless, but symbolically telling. Photos are often the only thing the public sees from such summits. And after wandering off from June’s G7 set piece in Italy (something he also appeared to do after a speech in the Amazon Sunday), it paints a picture of an increasingly irrelevant US. In any lame-duck period it’s hard to maintain primacy. This will be Biden’s last major global engagement.  

FOR BUSINESS. The photo appears to have been taken slightly ahead of schedule. Many will interpret it as a slight by Brazil, but that would display a distinct lack of gratitude by Lula da Silva, a day after Biden announced another $50 million for the Brazilian president’s Amazon Fund. And it would also be an own goal by the G20’s organisers, overshadowing an already paltry agenda, where agreements on tax and climate change look unlikely to be achieved.

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BRAZIL. Waxing and waning

Lula shows his country’s strengths and weaknesses.

Brazil's president opened the 19th G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro Monday, while also launching the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty. Police and soldiers fired on gangs in Rio's Cidade de Deus hillside township Sunday.

INTELLIGENCE. As with the 2016 Olympics and 2014 World Cup, Rio was on display in all its divergent glory. Brazil’s incomplete economic progress was