Summit Dialogue, Ep. 12: Matthew Goodman on the Japanese G20 Summit in Osaka (A US Perspective)

We begin the country tour of the major G20 members with Ep 12. Matthew Goodman is our guest from CSIS in Washington. As his short bio below will tell you, Matt has had both public and private sector roles and has been directly involved with the G20 in past administrations. If nothing else, as noted in Ep 11 with Yves Tiberghien, the G20 Summit was filled with pageantry – principally Donald Trump’s. There is a series of Trump events – meeting with China’s Xi Jinping over the US-China trade war, and, as it turns out, a rather vague agreement providing a truce in the tariff increases by the United States while negotiations resume, his encounters with Vladimir Putin and the breakfast with the Saudi Crown Prince and finally, but certainly not least, the meeting with Kim Jong-un at the Korean DMZ just after the completion of the Summit. One of the first questions we have for Matt is what is the Trump Administration up to; what was the President hoping to accomplish at the G20 in Japan? We were fortunate to be able to ask Matt to help us better understand the Administration’s stance with both the top-tier and mid-tier issues of this Summit. Matthew is senior vice president, senior adviser for Asian economics, and holds the Simon Chair in Political Economy at CSIS. Matthew has served in both the private sector at Goldman Sachs and Albright Stonebridge Group and has also held a number of significant roles in the public sector including early in his career as an international economist at the U.S. Treasury Department and at the Tokyo Embassy. Subsequently, he was director of international economics on the National Security Council staff responsible for the G20 and, the then G8, and then former White House Coordinator for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the East Asia Summit (EAS).