Two months ago, the leaders of the world’s seven major industrialized democracies met in summer sunshine on England’s southwest coast. It was a happy occasion: the first in-person summit of the Group of Seven nations in two years due to the coronavirus pandemic and the welcomed appearance of President Joe Biden and his “America is back” message on matters ranging from comity to COVID-19 to climate change. On Tuesday, those same seven leaders will meet again in virtual format confronted by a resurgence in the pandemic, more dire news on climate change and, most immediately and perhaps importantly, Afghanistan. The country’s burgeoning refugee crisis, the collapse of its government and fears of a resurgence in Afghan-based terrorism have left the G-7 allies scrambling and threaten the unity of the bloc. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the host of the June summit in the English resort of Carbis Bay, is now reconvening the leaders for crisis talks on Afghanistan amid widespread unhappiness about Biden’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Complaints have come from Britain, France, Germany and others in the G-7, which includes only one non-NATO member, Japan. Despite Biden’s April announcement that the U.S. would completely withdraw from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the central Asian nation was almost an afterthought when the G-7 met in June. Read: Biden says US-led evacuation from Kabul is accelerating COVID-19, China and climate change dominated the agenda. And expectations for Biden’s impending summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin were at the top of people’s tongues. The leaders put Afghanistan as number 57 out of 70 points in their final 25-page communique -– behind Ukraine, Belarus and Ethiopia. Afghanistan didn’t even feature in the one-and-a-half page summary of the document. NATO had already signed off on the U.S. withdrawal and all that appeared to be left was the completion of an orderly withdrawal and hopes for a peace deal between the Afghan government and Taliban. “We call on all Afghan parties to reduce violence and agree on steps that enable the successful implementation of a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire and to engage fully with the peace process. In Afghanistan, a sustainable, inclusive political settlement is the only way to achieve a just and durable peace that benefits all Afghans,” the leaders said, without a hint of urgency. The leaders said they were determined “to help the people of Afghanistan, including women, young people and minority groups, as they seek to preserve hard-won rights and freedoms,” they said. But as summer swings into fall, those hopes have been dashed. Johnson and others, including French President Emmanuel Macron, are pushing Biden to extend his self-imposed Aug. 31 deadline for the total withdrawal of U.S. forces in order to ensure the evacuation of all foreign nationals as well as Afghans who worked for or otherwise supported the American-led NATO operation that vanquished the Taliban in 2001 and has now accepted defeat. Read:Biden vows to evacuate all Americans — and Afghan helpers On the eve of the meeting, the White House said Biden and Johnson had spoken by phone and discussed “the importance of close coordination with allies and partners in managing the current situation and forging a common approach to Afghanistan policy.” Johnson’s office said the two leaders “agreed to continue working together to ensure those who are eligible to leave are able to, including after the initial phase of the evacuation has ended.” Biden administration officials have refused to be pinned down about whether an extension is likely or even possible given the Taliban’s demand that all U.S. forces leave by the Aug. 31 deadline. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she expected questions about the Afghanistan evacuation timeline to be part the G-7 meeting. Psaki would not predict any announcements from the meeting but said the focus would be to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies as quickly as possible. White House aides have said they think the meeting could grow contentious, as U.S. allies have looked on with disapproval at the tumultuous American drawdown. Senior British military officers have expressed anger over the U.S. pullout, saying it exposes the hollowness of the trans-Atlantic “special relationship” — a phrase used since World War II to stress the bonds of history, friendship and shared diplomatic interests between London and Washington. Read:Defiant Biden is face of chaotic Afghan evacuation And the German government is expressing impatience with the pace of the evacuation effort. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the majority of local staff who worked for his country in Afghanistan haven’t yet been gotten out and called Tuesday’s G-7 meeting “very important” for discussing international access to the Kabul airport beyond Aug. 31. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, who has called the U.S. deal with the Taliban that set the deadline a “mistake,” was downbeat about the prospects of an extension to the evacuation effort. “I think it is unlikely,” he told Sky News. “Not only because of what the Taliban has said but if you look at the public statements of President Biden I think it is unlikely. “It is definitely worth us all trying, and we will.”

U.S. President Joe Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin exchanged cordial words and plotted modest steps on arms control and diplomacy but emerged from their much-anticipated Swiss summit Wednesday largely where they started -- with deep differences on human rights, cyberattacks, election interference and more. The two leaders reached an important, but hardly relationship-changing agreement to return their chief diplomats to Moscow and Washington after they were called home as the relationship deteriorated in recent months. And Biden and Putin agreed to start working on a plan to solidify their countries’ last remaining treaty limiting nuclear weapons. But their three hours of talks on the shores of Lake Geneva left both men standing firmly in the same positions they had started in. “I’m not confident he’ll change his behavior,” Biden said at a post-summit news conference, when he was asked about what evidence he saw that former KGB agent Putin would adjust his ways and actions. “What will change his behavior is the rest of the world reacts to them, and they diminish their standing in the world. I’m not confident in anything.” Read:Face to face: Biden, Putin ready for long-anticipated summit Both the White House and Kremlin had set low expectations going into the summit. They issued a joint statement after the conclusion that said their meeting showed the “practical work our two countries can do to advance our mutual interests and also benefit the world.” But over and over, Biden defaulted to “we’ll find out” when assessing whether their discussions about nuclear power, cybersecurity and other thorny issues will pay off. Back-to-back news conferences by Biden and Putin after the summit also put in stark relief that getting at the root of tensions between the U.S. and Russia will remain an enormously difficult task — including when the two sides, at least in public comments, sketched dramatically different realities on cyber matters. Biden came into the summit pushing Putin to clamp down on the surge of Russian-originated cybersecurity and ransomware attacks that have targeted businesses and government agencies in the U.S. and around the globe. But when the summit ended, it wasn’t evident that more than superficial progress had been made. Biden said he made clear to Putin that if Russia crossed certain red lines — including going after major American infrastructure — his administration would respond and “the consequences of that would be devastating,” Putin, in turn, continued to insist Russia had nothing to do with cyber intrusions despite U.S. intelligence evidence that indicates otherwise. “Most of the cyberattacks in the world are carried out from the cyber realm of the United States,” said Putin, also adding Canada, two Latin American countries he didn’t name and Britain to the list. Read: Buoyed by allied summits, Biden ready to take on Putin While the U.S., Canada and Britain all engage in cyberespionage, the most damaging cyberattacks on record have come either from state-backed Russian hackers or Russian-speaking ransomware criminals who operate with impunity in Russia and allied nations. In fact, the worst have been attributed by the United States and the European Union to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, including the NotPetya virus that did more than $10 billion in economic damage in 2017, hitting companies including shipping giant Maersk, the pharmaceutical company Merck and food company Mondolez. Putin agreed at the summit that Russia will begin consultations with the U.S. on the matter and acknowledged that ransomware and cyberattacks are big problems. Still, he maintained that the two countries “just need to abandon various insinuations.” Despite the clear differences, Biden insisted that progress had been made, scolding reporters for being too pessimistic during a chat on the tarmac just before he boarded Air Force One to return home. “There is a value to being realistic and putting on ... an optimistic face, ” the president said. Biden said the two leaders spent a “great deal of time” discussing cybersecurity and he believed Putin understood the U.S. position. “I pointed out to him, we have significant cyber capability,” Biden said. “In fact, (if) they violate basic norms, we will respond.” Read:What They Want: Divergent goals for Biden, Putin at summit A disconnect between the two leaders was apparent on other matters, large and small. Biden raised human rights issues with Putin, including the fate of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Putin defended Navalny’s prison sentence and deflected repeated questions about mistreatment of Russian opposition leaders by highlighting U.S. domestic turmoil, including the Black Lives Matter protests and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Biden was having none of it. “My response is kind of what I communicated” to Putin, Biden said. “That’s a ridiculous comparison.” Putin held forth for nearly an hour before international reporters after the summit. While showing defiance at questions about Biden pressing him on human rights, he also expressed respect for the U.S. president as an experienced political leader. The Russian noted that Biden repeated wise advice his mother had given him and that American president also spoke about his family — messaging that Putin said might not have been entirely relevant to their summit but demonstrated Biden’s “moral values.” Overall, the tone was more businesslike than Putin’s 2018 summit with then-President Donald Trump, who embraced some of Putin’s unlikely statements about election interference but was considered somewhat amateurish and unpredictable by the Russians. At this faceoff, though Putin raised doubt that the U.S.-Russia relationship could soon return to a measure of equilibrium of years past, he suggested that Biden was someone he could work with. Read: Biden, unlike predecessors, has maintained Putin skepticism “The meeting was actually very efficient,” Putin said. “It was substantive, it was specific. It was aimed at achieving results, and one of them was pushing back the frontiers of trust.” The summit had a somewhat awkward beginning — both men appeared to avoid looking directly at each other during a brief and chaotic photo opportunity before a scrum of jostling reporters. It ended sooner than expected. Biden said that was because they had covered all the key areas and then “looked at each other like, OK, what next?” Then Biden answered his own question “What is going to happen next is we are going to be able to look back, look ahead in three to six months and say ‘Did the things we agreed to sit down and try to work out, did it work?’”

U.S. President Joe Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin sit down Wednesday for their highly anticipated summit i n the Swiss city of Geneva, a moment of high-stakes diplomacy at a time when both leaders agree that relations between their countries are at an all-time low. For four months, the two leaders have traded sharp rhetoric. Biden repeatedly called out Putin for malicious cyberattacks by Russian-based hackers on U.S. interests, a disregard for democracy with the jailing of Russia’s foremost opposition leader and interference in American elections. Putin, for his part, has reacted with whatabout-isms and obfuscations — pointing to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to argue that the U.S. has no business lecturing on democratic norms and insisting that the Russian government hasn’t been involved in any election interference or cyberattacks despite U.S. intelligence showing otherwise. Now, the pair will meet for their first face-to-face as leaders — a conversation that is expected to last four to five hours. In advance, both sides set out to lower expectations. Read: Buoyed by allied summits, Biden ready to take on Putin Even so, Biden has said it would be an important step if the United States and Russia were able to ultimately find “stability and predictability” in their relationship, a seemingly modest goal from the president for dealing with the person he sees as one of America’s fiercest adversaries. “We should decide where it’s in our mutual interest, in the interest of the world, to cooperate, and see if we can do that,” Biden told reporters earlier this week. “And the areas where we don’t agree, make it clear what the red lines are.” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that no breakthroughs were expected and that “the situation is too difficult in Russian-American relations.” “However, the fact that the two presidents agreed to meet and finally start to speak openly about the problems is already an achievement,” Peskov said several hours before the summit’s scheduled start time. Arrangements for the meeting have been carefully choreographed and vigorously negotiated by both sides. Biden first floated the meeting in an April phone call in which he informed Putin that he would be expelling several Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions against dozens of people and companies, part of an effort to hold the Kremlin accountable for interference in last year’s presidential election and the hacking of federal agencies. Putin and his entourage will arrive first at the summit site: Villa La Grange, a grand lakeside mansion set in Geneva’s biggest park. Next come Biden and his team. Swiss President Guy Parmelin will greet the two leaders. Read: What They Want: Divergent goals for Biden, Putin at summit The three will spend a moment together in front of the cameras, but only Parmelin is expected to make remarks, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity. Biden and Putin first will hold a relatively intimate meeting joined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Each side will have a translator. The meeting will then expand to include five senior aides on each side. After the meeting concludes, Putin is scheduled to hold a solo news conference, with Biden following suit. The White House opted against a joint news conference, deciding it did not want to appear to elevate Putin at a moment when the president is urging European allies to pressure Putin to cut out myriad provocations. Biden sees himself with few peers on foreign policy. He traveled the globe as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was given difficult foreign policy assignments by President Barack Obama when Biden was vice president. His portfolio included messy spots like Iraq and Ukraine and weighing the mettle of China’s Xi Jinping during his rise to power. He has repeatedly said that he believes executing effective foreign policy comes from forming strong personal relations, and he has managed to find rapport with both the likes of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom Biden has labeled an “autocrat,” and conventional politicians like Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Read: Biden eases trade friction with EU ahead of Putin summit But with Putin, whom the president has “no soul,” Biden has long been wary. At the same time, he acknowledges that Putin, who remained the most powerful figure in Russian politics over the span of five U.S. presidents, is not without talent. Biden this week suggested that he is approaching his meeting with Putin carefully. “He’s bright. He’s tough,” Biden said. “And I have found that he is a — as they say...a worthy adversary.” The White House held on to hope of finding small areas of agreement. No commitments have been made, but according to the senior administration official, there are hopes that both sides will return their ambassadors to their respective postings following the meeting. Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was recalled from Washington about three months ago after Biden called Putin a killer; U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan left Moscow almost two months ago, after Russia suggested he return to Washington for consultations. Both ambassadors will be in Geneva during Wednesday’s meeting. Biden administration officials say they think common ground can be found on arms control. International arms control groups are pressing the Russian and American leaders to start a push for new arms control by holding “strategic stability” talks — a series of government-to-government discussions meant to sort through the many areas of disagreement and tension on the national security front. The Biden team will press its concerns on cybersecurity. In recent months, Russia-based hackers have launched alarming attacks on a major U.S. oil pipeline and a Brazil-headquartered meat supplier that operates in the U.S. Read:Biden, unlike predecessors, has maintained Putin skepticism The Russian side has said that the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is an internal political matter and one area where Putin won’t engage Biden. But the senior Biden administration official said there “is no issue that is off the table for the president,” suggesting Navalny will come up. The meeting is sure to invite comparisons with President Donald Trump’s 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, where the two leaders held a joint news conference and Trump sided with Russian denials when asked whether Moscow had meddled in the 2016 presidential election. Biden has prepared for his one-on-one by reviewing materials and consulting with officials across government and with outside advisers. Aides said the level of preparation wasn’t unusual. Biden, in a brief exchange with reporters upon a rriving in Geneva on Tuesday night, sought to offer the impression that he wasn’t sweating his big meeting. “I am always ready,” Biden said.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO counterparts will bid a symbolic farewell to Afghanistan on Monday in their last summit before America winds up its longest “forever war” and the U.S. military pulls out for good. The meeting is bound to renew questions about whether NATO’s most ambitious operation ever was worth it. The 18-year effort cost the United States alone $2.26 trillion, and the price in lives includes 2,442 American troops and 1,144 personnel among U.S. allies, according to figures from Brown University. NATO does not keep a record of those who die in its operations. Those casualty figures dwarf Afghan losses, which include more than 47,000 civilians, up to 69,000 members of the national armed forces and police, and over 51,000 opposition fighters. Read: Biden urges G-7 leaders to call out and compete with China The military effort followed the 2001 arrival of a U.S.-led coalition that ousted the Taliban for harboring al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Few experts argue that it brought long-term stability, meaningful democracy or security. “At this point, you get the impression that NATO leaders almost want to downplay and leave quietly, rather than making too big a deal of it, and going on to focus on other business,” said Erik Brattberg, director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. With the U.S. leading the withdrawal, European allies and Canada want to hear Biden’s thinking about how security will be assured at their embassies, along major transport routes and above all at Kabul’s airport. Many wonder whether the Afghan government can survive a resurgent Taliban. Some think Kabul’s capitulation is only a matter of time. “We are currently in intense discussions with our member states, the United States, NATO and the United Nations on the absence of essential security conditions for our continued diplomatic presence. It will be difficult to keep it” in place, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said. For now, NATO plans to leave civilian advisers to help build up government institutions. It’s unclear who will protect them. The 30-nation alliance is also weighing whether to train Afghan special forces outside the country. As an organization, NATO will not provide sanctuary for Afghans who worked alongside its forces — routinely risking their lives — although a few individual members will. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says it’s simply time to leave. “Afghanistan has come a long way, both when it comes to building strong, capable security forces, but also when it comes to social and economic progress,” he told The Associated Press. “At some stage, it has to be the Afghans that take full responsibility for peace and stability in their own country.” Read: Biden sells G-7 on global tax, but U.S. Congress is a hurdle Few Afghans share that assessment of their country, which has a 54% poverty rate, runaway crime, rampant corruption and an illicit economy that outstrips the legal economy. When NATO took charge of international security operations in 2003, Afghanistan was its first major mission outside Europe and North America. The aim was to stabilize the government, build up local security forces and remove a potential base for extremist groups. Yet 18 years later, security is at its lowest ebb for most Afghans. The capital is rife with criminal gangs, many linked to powerful warlords, and there are routine attacks by an upstart Islamic State. Quite early into the operations, as combat took its toll on NATO troops, extremists and civilians, a stalemate developed. The Taliban could not be routed from outlying areas, but neither could its fighters seize and hold major cities. Troop surges made little difference, and it soon became clear that NATO’s military training effort was its exit strategy. Only by creating a big army capable of standing on its own feet could the organization wind up its operations. But the Afghan army was plagued by corruption, desertion and low morale. Experts say it still is, and this remains a major concern as NATO insists on funding the nation’s security forces after it’s gone. Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to leave by May 1 stunned U.S. allies. It highlighted NATO’s weakness: European members and Canada simply cannot sustain major operations without logistical support from their biggest partner. Biden’s decision to pull U.S. troops out by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington changed little, although he did consult allies this time. Read: G-7 nations expected to pledge 1B vaccine doses for world James Dobbins, a former Afghan envoy who now works for the RAND Corporation think tank, predicts the exit will mean the loss of government legitimacy. “The U.S. departure will be seen as a victory for the Taliban and a defeat for the United States,” he said in an opinion piece. “The result will be a blow to American credibility, the weakening of deterrence and the value of American reassurance elsewhere.” On Monday, NATO’s leaders will reaffirm the strength of their alliance and go back to what they know best: their old nemesis, Russia. Biden will brief his partners before meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was not invited to NATO’s summit. “There is little appetite left to continue investing in Afghanistan,” Brattberg said. “There is a sense of being fed up in a lot of NATO countries, and now it’s just time to pack the bags and get out with little consideration about the consequences that could have on the ground.”

Leaders of the world’s largest economies unveiled an infrastructure plan Saturday for the developing world to compete with China’s global initiatives, but they were searching for a consensus on how to forcefully to call out Beijing over human rights abuses. Citing China for its forced labor practices is part of President Joe Biden’s campaign to persuade fellow democratic leaders to present a more unified front to compete economically with Beijing. But while they agreed to work toward competing against China, there was less unity on how adversarial a public position the group should take. Canada, the United Kingdom and France largely endorsed Biden’s position, while Germany, Italy and the European Union showed more hesitancy during Saturday’s first session of the Group of Seven summit, according to two senior Biden administration officials. The officials who briefed reporters were not authorized to publicly discuss the private meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity. The communique that summarizes the meeting’s commitments was being written and the contents would not be clear until it was released when the summit ended Sunday. White House officials said late Saturday that they believed that China, in some form, could be called out for “nonmarket policies and human rights abuses.” Read: Biden sells G-7 on global tax, but U.S. Congress is a hurdle In his first summit as president, Biden made a point of carving out one-on-one-time with various leaders, bouncing from French president Emmanuel Macron to German chancellor Angela Merkel to Italian prime minister Mario Draghi as well as Japan’s Yoshihide Suga and Australia’s Scott Morrison, a day after meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as if to personally try to ward off memories of the chaos that his predecessor would often bring to these gatherings. Macron told Biden that collaboration was needed on a range of issues and told the American president that “it’s great to have a U.S. president part of the club and very willing to cooperate.” Relations between the allies had become strained during the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency and his “America first” foreign policy. Merkel, for her part, downplayed differences on China and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which would transport natural gas from Russia to Germany, bypassing Ukraine. “The atmosphere is very cooperative, it is characterized by mutual interest,” Merkel said. “There are very good, constructive and very vivid discussions in the sense that one wants to work together.” White House officials have said Biden wants the leaders of the G-7 nations — the U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Italy — to speak in a single voice against forced labor practices targeting China’s Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities. Biden hopes the denunciation will be part of a joint statement to be released Sunday when the summit ends, but some European allies are reluctant to split so forcefully with Beijing. China had become one of the more compelling sublots of the wealthy nations’ summit, their first since 2019. Last year’s gathering was canceled because of COVID-19, and recovery from the pandemic is dominating this year’s discussions, with leaders expected to commit to sharing at least 1 billion vaccine shots with struggling countries. Read: G-7 nations expected to pledge 1B vaccine doses for world The allies also took the first steps in presenting an infrastructure proposal called “Build Back Better for the World,” a name echoing Biden’s campaign slogan. The plan calls for spending hundreds of billions of dollars in collaboration with the private sector while adhering to climate standards and labor practices. It’s designed to compete with China’s trillion-dollar “Belt and Road Initiative,” which has launched a network of projects and maritime lanes that snake around large portions of the world, primarily Asia and Africa. Critics say China’s projects often create massive debt and expose nations to undue influence by Beijing. Britain also wants the world’s democracies to become less reliant on the Asian economic giant. The U.K. government said Saturday’s discussions would tackle “how we can shape the global system to deliver for our people in support of our values,” including by diversifying supply chains that currently heavily depend on China. Not every European power has viewed China in as harsh a light as Biden, who has painted the rivalry with China as the defining competition for the 21st century. But there are some signs that Europe is willing to impose greater scrutiny. Before Biden took office in January, the European Commission announced it had come to terms with Beijing on a deal meant to provide Europe and China with greater access to each other’s markets. The Biden administration had hoped to have consultations on the pact. But the deal has been put on hold, and the European Union in March announced sanctions targeting four Chinese officials involved with human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Beijing responded with penalties on several members of the European Parliament and other Europeans critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Read: G-7 to put off agreement on when to end coal-fired power generation Biden administration officials see an opportunity to take concrete action to speak out against China’s reliance on forced labor as an “affront to human dignity.” While calling out China in the G-7 communique would not create any immediate penalties for Beijing, one senior administration official said the action would send a message that the leaders were serious about defending human rights and working together to eradicate the use of forced labor. An estimated 1 million people or more — most of them Uyghurs — have been confined in reeducation camps in China’s western Xinjiang region in recent years, according to researchers. Chinese authorities have been accused of imposing forced labor, systematic forced birth control, torture and separating children from incarcerated parents. Beijing rejects allegations that it is committing crimes. Johnson, the summit host, also welcomed the leaders from “guest nations” South Korea, Australia and South Africa, as well as the head of the United Nations, to the summit to “intensify cooperation between the world’s democratic and technologically advanced nations.” The leaders planned to attend a barbecue Saturday night, complete with toasted marshmallows, hot buttered rum and a performance by a sea shanty troupe. Read: G-7 finance ministers agree on 15% int'l minimum corporate tax rate India was also invited but its delegation is not attending in person because of the severe coronavirus outbreak in the country. Biden ends the trip Wednesday by meeting in Geneva with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The White House announced Saturday that they will not hold a joint news conference afterward, which removes the opportunity for comparisons to the availability that followed Trump and Putin’s 2018 Helsinki summit, in which Trump sided with Moscow over his own intelligence agencies. Only Biden will address the news media after the meeting. Putin, in an interview with NBC News, said the U.S.-Russia relationship had “deteriorated to its lowest point in recent years.” He added that while Trump was a “talented” and “colorful” person, Biden was a “career man” in politics, which has “some advantages, some disadvantages, but there will not be any impulse-based movements” by the U.S. president.

Health officials and experts in Asia have welcomed U.S. plans to share 500 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine with the developing world, but some say it would take more than donations alone to address huge vaccination gaps that threaten to prolong the pandemic. President Joe Biden was set to make the announcement Thursday in a speech before the start of the Group of Seven summit in Britain. Two hundred million doses — enough to fully protect 100 million people — would be shared this year, with the balance to be donated in the first half of 2022, according to a source familiar with the matter who confirmed the news of the Pfizer sharing plan. Jaehun Jung, a professor of preventive medicine at South Korea’s Gachon University College of Medicine, said the U.S. donations may proveto be a “huge turning point” in the global fight against COVID-19, but also lamented that the help couldn’t come earlier. He said the extremely cold storage temperatures required for Pfizer shots would present challenges for countries with poor health systems and called for U.S. officials and the New York-based drug maker to explore the possibility of easing the requirements. Read:AP source: US to buy 500M Pfizer vaccines to share globally He said the delay in U.S. help was “understandable, because the United States initially had its own troubles with supplies while inoculating its own population. But for now, it’s critical to move up the timing of the vaccine provisions to the earliest possible point.” According to the person who spoke to the AP, the Biden administration plans to provide the 500 million shots it purchases from Pfizer to 92 lower income countries and the African Union over the next year through the U.N.-backed COVAX program. The United States has faced increasing pressure to outline its global vaccine sharing plan. Inequities in supplies around the world have become more pronounced while there’s increasing concern over newer virus variants emerging from areas with consistently high COVID-19 circulation. The White House had earlier announced plans to share 80 million doses globally by the end of June, most through COVAX. The additional donation of the Pfizer shots is crucial because the global disparity in vaccination has become a multidimensional threat: a human catastrophe, a $5 trillion economic loss for advanced economies, and a contributor to the generation of mutant viruses, said Jerome Kim, the head of the International Vaccine Institute, a non-profit dedicated to making vaccines available to developing countries. Read: G7 must ensure vaccine access in developing countries: UN experts Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of South Korea’s Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said the success of Biden’s vaccine-sharing plan would depend mainly on how fast the shots could be manufactured and sent to countries in need amid global shortages. She also echoed Jung’s concerns about Pfizer’s cold chain requirements and said the U.S. donations should be accompanied with efforts to improve infrastructure and educate health workers in receiving countries. “It’s very important to manage international cooperation so that the whole world can be vaccinated quickly,” she said during a briefing. The United States has yet to confirm the 92 lower-income countries that would be receiving the Pfizer shots. In Asia, Jung said that India and Southeast Asia are in desperate need of donations. Vaccinating isolated North Korea could also prove to be a difficult challenge. Some experts say donations alone wouldn’t be enough to close the huge gaps in supplies and call for a transition toward a distributed system of vaccine manufacturing where qualified companies around the world would produce their own shots without intellectual property constraints. Read: WTO panel considers easing protections on COVID-19 vaccines But Jung said many developing countries depending on COVAX donations don’t have the industrial resources to manufacture advanced vaccines like Pfizer’s mRNA shots. As countries around the world struggled to access vaccines, unable to secure bilateral deals with companies like Pfizer, many have turned to China. China has exported 350 million doses of its vaccines to dozens of countries, according to its Foreign Ministry. China has pledged 10 million doses to COVAX, and the Chinese drug maker Sinopharm said last week it had just finished a batch of vaccines for sharing with COVAX. The WHO had approved the vaccine for emergency use last month. While Chinese vaccines have faced scrutiny because of a lack of transparency in sharing clinical trial data, many countries were desperate to take what was available and found the shots easier to use as they could be stored in normal refrigerators.

One year ago, the U.S. was the deadliest hotspot of the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the cancellation of the Group of Seven summit it was due to host. Now, the U.S. is emerging as a model for how to successfully emerge from more than 15 months of global crisis. For President Joe Biden, who is meeting with leaders of the wealthy G-7 democracies on his first overseas trip since taking office, it’s a personal vindication of his pledge to turn around the U.S. virus, but also a call to action to enlist other countries in the global fight. In a speech on the eve of the summit, Biden on Thursday will unveil plans for the U.S. to donate 500 million vaccine doses around the globe over the next year, on top of 80 million he has already pledged by the end of the month. U.S. officials say Biden will also include a direct request to his fellow G-7 leaders to do the same. “We have to end COVID-19, not just at home — which we’re doing — but everywhere,” Biden told American servicemembers Wednesday on the first stop of his three-country, eight-day trip, adding that the effort “requires coordinated, multilateral action.” Read:Biden opens overseas trip declaring ‘United States is back’ “There’s no wall high enough to keep us safe from this pandemic or the next biological threat we face — and there will be others,” he added. The U.S. has faced mounting pressure to outline its global vaccine sharing plan, especially as inequities in supply around the world have become more pronounced, and the demand for shots in the U.S. has dropped precipitously in recent weeks. The new U.S. commitment is to purchase and donate 500 million Pfizer doses for distribution through the global COVAX alliance to 92 lower-income countries and the African Union, bringing the first steady supply of mRNA vaccine to the countries that need it most. The U.S. is now set to be COVAX’s largest vaccine donor in addition to its single largest funder with a $4 billion commitment. The global alliance has thus far distributed just 81 million doses, and parts of the world, particularly in Africa, remain vaccine deserts. After leading the world in new cases and deaths over much of the last year, the rapid vaccination program in the U.S. now positions the country among the leaders of the global recovery. Nearly 64% of adults in the U.S. have received at least one vaccine dose and the average numbers of new positive cases and deaths in the U.S. are lower now than at any point since the earliest days of the pandemic. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last week projected that the U.S. economy would grow at a rate of 6.9% this year, making it one of the few nations for which forecasts are rosier now than before the pandemic. U.S. officials are hopeful the summit will conclude with a communique showing a commitment from the G-7 countries and other invited nations to do more to help vaccinate the world and support public health globally. “I don’t anticipate contention on the issue of vaccines. I anticipate convergence,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Wednesday. “Because we’re all converging around the idea that we need to boost vaccine supply in a number of ways: sharing more of our own doses — and we’ll have more to say on that; helping get more manufacturing capacity around the world — we’ll have more to say on that; and, of course, doing what’s necessary across the chain of custody from when the vaccine is produced to when it gets in someone’s arms in the rural developing world, and we’ll have more to say on that.” Read:Biden to assure allies, meet Putin during 1st overseas trip Last week, the White House unveiled plans to donate an initial allotment of 25 million doses of surplus vaccine overseas, mostly through the United Nations-backed COVAX program, promising infusions for South and Central America, Asia, Africa and others. Officials say a quarter of that excess will be kept in reserve for emergencies and for the U.S. to share directly with allies and partners, including South Korea, Taiwan and Ukraine. Sullivan noted that Biden has previously committed to turning the U.S. into a modern day “arsenal of democracies” for vaccines, but that the country also has health reasons for spreading vaccinations — preventing the rise of potentially dangerous variants — and geostrategic ones as well. China and Russia have shared, with varying success, their domestically produced vaccines with some needy countries, often with hidden strings attached. Sullivan said Biden “does want to show — rallying the rest of the world’s democracies — that democracies are the countries that can best deliver solutions for people everywhere.” The U.S.-produced mRNA vaccines have also proven to be more effective against both the original strain and more dangerous variants of COVID-19 than the more conventional vaccines produced by China and Russia. Some countries that have had success in deploying those conventional vaccines have nonetheless seen cases spike. Biden’s decision to purchase the doses, officials said, was meant to keep them from getting locked up by richer nations that have the means to enter into purchasing agreements directly with manufacturers. Just last month, the European Commission signed an agreement to purchase as many as 1.8 billion Pfizer doses in the next two years, a significant share of the company’s upcoming production — though the bloc reserved the right to donate some of its doses to COVAX. Global public health groups have been aiming to use this week’s G-7 meetings to press the nation’s wealthiest democracies to do more to share vaccines with the world, and Biden’s plans drew immediate praise toward that end. Tom Hart, acting CEO at The ONE Campaign, a nonprofit that seeks to end poverty, said Biden’s announcement was “the kind of bold leadership that is needed to end this global pandemic.” Read:US to swiftly boost global vaccine sharing, Biden announces “We urge other G-7 countries to follow the U.S.’ example and donate more doses to COVAX,” he added. “If there was ever a time for global ambition and action to end the pandemic, it’s now.” But others have called on the U.S. to do even more. “Charity is not going to win the war against the coronavirus,” said Niko Lusiani, Oxfam America’s vaccine lead. “At the current rate of vaccinations, it would take low-income countries 57 years to reach the same level of protection as those in G-7 countries. That’s not only morally wrong, it’s self-defeating given the risk posed by coronavirus mutations.” Biden last month broke with European allies to endorse waiving intellectual property rules at the World Trade Organization to promote vaccine production and equity. But many in his own administration acknowledge that the restrictions were not the driving cause of the global vaccine shortage, which has more to do with limited manufacturing capacity and shortages of delicate raw materials.

Set to embark on the first overseas trip of his term, President Joe Biden is eager to reassert the United States on the world stage, steadying European allies deeply shaken by his predecessor and pushing democracy as the only bulwark to rising forces of authoritarianism. Biden has set the stakes for his eight-day trip in sweeping terms, believing that the West must publicly demonstrate it can compete economically with China as the world emerges from the coronavirus pandemic. Building toward his trip-ending summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Biden will aim to reassure European capitals that the United States can once again be counted on as a dependable partner to thwart Moscow’s aggression both on their eastern front and their internet battlefields. The trip will be far more about messaging than specific actions or deals. And the paramount priority for Biden, who leaves Wednesday for his first stop in the United Kingdom, is to convince the world that his administration is not just a fleeting deviation in the trajectory of an American foreign policy that many allies fear irrevocably drifted toward a more transactional outlook under former President Donald Trump. Read: Biden rebuffs GOP infrastructure offer, citing broader goals “The trip, at its core, will advance the fundamental thrust of Joe Biden’s foreign policy,” said national security adviser Jake Sullivan, “to rally the world’s democracies to tackle the great challenges of our time.” Biden’s to-do list is ambitious. In their face-to-face sit-down in Geneva, Biden wants to privately pressure Putin to end myriad provocations, including cybersecurity attacks on American businesses by Russian-based hackers, the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and repeated overt and covert efforts by the Kremlin to interfere in U.S. elections. Biden is also looking to rally allies on their COVID-19 response and to urge them to coalesce around a strategy to check emerging economic and national security competitor China even as the U.S. expresses concern about Europe’s economic links to Moscow. Biden also wants to nudge outlying allies, including Australia, to make more aggressive commitments to the worldwide effort to curb global warming. The week-plus journey is a big moment for Biden, who traveled the world for decades as vice president and as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and will now step off Air Force One on international soil as commander in chief. He will face world leaders still grappling with the virus and rattled by four years of Trump’s inward-looking foreign policy and moves that strained longtime alliances as the former president made overtures to strongmen. “In this moment of global uncertainty, as the world still grapples with a once-in-a-century pandemic,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post op-ed previewing his diplomatic efforts, “this trip is about realizing America’s renewed commitment to our allies and partners, and demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age.” The president first travels to Britain for a summit of the Group of Seven leaders and then Brussels for a NATO summit and a meeting with the heads of the European Union. It comes at a moment when Europeans have diminished expectations for what they can expect of U.S. leadership on the foreign stage. Central and Eastern Europeans are desperately hoping to bind the U.S. more tightly to their security. Germany is looking to see the U.S. troop presence maintained there so it doesn’t need to build up its own. France, meanwhile, has taken the tack that the U.S. can’t be trusted as it once was and that the European Union must pursue greater strategic autonomy going forward. “I think the concern is real that the Trumpian tendencies in the U.S. could return full bore in the midterms or in the next presidential election,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. diplomat and once deputy secretary general of NATO. Read:US to swiftly boost global vaccine sharing, Biden announces The sequencing of the trip is deliberate: Biden consulting with Western European allies for much of a week as a show of unity before his summit with Putin. His first stop late Wednesday will be an address to U.S. troops stationed in Britain, and the next day he sits down with British Prime Minster Boris Johnson. The two men will meet a day ahead of the G-7 summit to be held above the craggy cliffs of Cornwall overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The most tactile of politicians, Biden has grown frustrated by the diplomacy-via-Zoom dynamics of the pandemic and has relished the ability to again have face-to-face meetings that allow him to size up and connect with world leaders. While Biden himself is a veteran statesman, many of the world leaders he will see in England, including Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron, took office after Biden left the vice presidency. Another, Germany’s Angela Merkel, will leave office later this year. There are several potential areas of tension. On climate change, the U.S. is aiming to regain its credibility after Trump pulled the country back from the fight against global warming. Biden could also feel pressure on trade, an issue to which he’s yet to give much attention. And with the United States well supplied with COVID-19 vaccines yet struggling to persuade some of its own citizens to use it, leaders whose inoculation campaigns have been slower will surely pressure Biden to share more surplus around the globe. Another central focus will be China. Biden and the other G-7 leaders will announce an infrastructure financing program for developing countries that is meant to compete directly with Beijing’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. But not every European power has viewed China in as harsh a light as Biden, who has painted the rivalry with the techno-security state as the defining competition for the 21st century. The European Union has avoided taking as strong a stance on Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy movement or treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province as the Biden administration may like. But there are signs that Europe is willing to put greater scrutiny on Beijing. The EU in March announced sanctions targeting four Chinese officials involved with human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Beijing, in turn, responded by imposing sanctions on several members of the European Parliament and other Europeans critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Biden is also scheduled to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while in Brussels, a face-to-face meeting between two leaders who have had many fraught moments in their relationship over the years. Biden waited until April to call Erdogan for the first time as president. In that call, he informed the Turkish leader that he would formally recognize that the systematic killings and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces in the early 20th century were “genocide” — using a term for the atrocities that his White House predecessors had avoided for decades over concerns of alienating Turkey. Read:Free beer, other new incentives for Biden’s ‘vaccine sprint’ The trip finale will be Biden’s meeting with Putin. Biden has taken a very different approach to Russia than Trump’s friendly outreach. Their sole summit, held in July 2018 in Helsinki, was marked by Trump’s refusal to side with U.S. intelligence agencies over Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the election two years earlier. Biden could well be challenged by unrest at home as Russia looks to exploit the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and the debate over voting rights to undermine the U.S. position as a global role model. The American president, in turn, is expected to push Russia to quell its global meddling. “By and large, these are not meetings on outcomes, these are ‘get to know you again’ meetings for the U.S. and Europe,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s about delivering a message to Putin, to reviving old alliances and to demonstrate again that the U.S. is back on the right course.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will use the Group of Seven wealthy democracies’ summit next week to urge world leaders to commit to vaccinating the global population by the end of 2022. Johnson is expected to stress the importance of a global vaccination drive when he meets with fellow world leaders on Friday in Cornwall, on England’s southwestern coast, for the first face-to-face G-7 summit since the pandemic hit. Read:European regulators OK Pfizer vaccine for children 12-15 “The world is looking to us to rise to the greatest challenge of the postwar era: defeating COVID and leading a global recovery driven by our shared values,” he said in a statement Sunday. “Vaccinating the world by the end of next year would be the single greatest feat in medical history.” U.S. President Joe Boden and the leaders of Canada, France, Italy and Japan will arrive in Cornwall from Friday for three days of talks focusing on the global recovery from the pandemic. Read:In time for summer, Europe sees dramatic fall in virus cases Britain’s government pledged in February to give most of the country’s surplus vaccine supply to COVAX, the U.N.-backed program aiming to supply poorer countries with jabs. But the U.K. hasn’t yet put a figure on how many doses it will donate. The country, with a population of about 70 million people, has ordered around 400 million doses of vaccines. Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said that the U.K. doesn’t have any excess doses at the moment and that “we’re just getting them into arms as quickly as possible.” Read:Rise in UK coronavirus cases stoke concerns over 3rd wave The Sunday Times reported that Johnson is set to announce at the summit that the U.K. will pledge to donate over 2 billion pounds’ worth of jabs this year, with further donations in 2022. The U.S. has said it plans to share 80 million doses of its surplus vaccine globally by the end of June, most of them through COVAX.

North Korea said Monday the U.S. allowing South Korea to build more powerful missiles was an example of the U.S.’s hostile policy against the North, warning that it could lead to an “acute and instable situation” on the Korean Peninsula. It’s North Korea’s first response to the May 21 summit between the leaders of the United States and South Korea, during which the U.S. ended decades-long restrictions that capped South Korea’s missile development and allowed its ally to develop weapons with unlimited ranges. Read: South Korea mulls dropping masks for vaccinated The accusation of U.S. policy being hostile to North Korea matters because it said it won’t return to talks and would enlarge its nuclear arsenal as long as U.S. hostility persists. But the latest statement was still attributed to an individual commentator, not a government body, suggesting North Korea may still want to leave room for potential diplomacy with the Biden administration. “The termination step is a stark reminder of the U.S. hostile policy toward (North Korea) and its shameful double-dealing,” Kim Myong Chol, an international affairs critic, said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. “It is engrossed in confrontation despite its lip-service to dialogue.” “The U.S. is mistaken, however. It is a serious blunder for it to pressurize (North Korea) by creating asymmetric imbalance in and around the Korean Peninsula as this may lead to the acute and instable situation on the Korean Peninsula now technically at war,” he said. The United States had previously barred South Korea from developing a missile with a range of longer than 800 kilometers (500 miles) out of concerns about a regional arms race. The range is enough for a South Korean weapon to strike all of North Korea but is short of hitting potential key targets in other neighbors like China and Japan. Read:South Korea, US discuss joint responses to falling Chinese rocket debris Some South Korean observers hailed the end of the restrictions as restoring military sovereignty, but others suspected the U.S. intent was to boost its ally’s military capability amid a rivalry with China. The commentator Kim accused Washington of trying to spark an arms race, thwart North Korean development and deploy intermediate-range missiles targeting countries near North Korea. The South Korean government said it “prudently watches” North Korea’s reaction, but Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo wouldn’t comment otherwise, since the remarks were attributed to an individual, not an official statement from the North Korean government. The North Korean statement comes as the Biden administration shapes a new approach on North Korea amid long-dormant talks over the North’s nuclear program. During their summit, Biden and South Korean President Moon Jae-in said a new U.S. policy review on North Korea “takes a calibrated and practical approach that is open to and will explore diplomacy” with the North. Read:China: US should push North Korea diplomacy, not pressure U.S. officials have suggested Biden would adopt a middle ground policy between his predecessors — Donald Trump’s direct dealings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Barack Obama’s “strategic patience.” Some experts say Biden won’t likely provide North Korea with major sanctions relief unless it takes concrete denuclearization steps first. The North Korean statement criticized the Biden administration’s review indirectly, saying the new policy was viewed by other countries “as just trickery.”