Global Courant 2023-05-18 15:30:27
President Biden began his abbreviated Asia trip Thursday in Hiroshima, a city committed to reminding the world of what happens when a brutal war escalates to nuclear war. There, he prepared for talks with his closest allies on two crucial issues: how to better arm Ukraine as it launches its counter-offensive against the Russian invaders, and how to slow or stop the downward spiral in relations with China.
Both are now familiar topics to the leaders of the Group of 7 countries, who have become much closer and have remained surprisingly united since Russia launched its assault on Ukraine 15 months ago. But at some point, over three days of discussions, G7 leaders are also expected to venture into new territory: the first talks among the world’s major democratic economies about a common approach to regulating the use of generative artificial intelligence programs such as GPT-4.
Artificial intelligence was not on the early agenda when Prime Minister Fumio Kishida invited the other six leaders — along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and, via video or in person, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — to the Japanese prefecture where he made his political beginnings.
But when OpenAI’s new AI language model first made countries around the world focus on the possibilities of disinformation, chaos and the physical destruction of critical infrastructure, Mr Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan began calling counterparts to to find a joint discussion.
It is far from clear that this group of leaders – the G7 also includes Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Italy – can hold a conversation about a technology that seemed to emerge so quickly, even though it had been years in the making. . Past efforts to get the group to tackle much simpler cybersecurity issues have mostly boiled down to platitudes about “public-private partnerships”, and there has never been any serious discussion of rules governing the use of offensive cyberweapons.
US officials say that in the case of chatbots, even a vague basic discussion can help establish some shared principles: that the companies that market products using the major language models will be primarily responsible for their security, and that there should be transparency rules that make it clear what kind of data each system has been trained on. That allows lower-level aides to discuss details of what those first lines would look like, the officials said.
But as G7 leaders meet on Friday, it will be Ukraine that will dominate the conversation, at a critical time for Mr Zelensky, for Ukraine and for Western core democracies now preoccupied with an urgent mission to bring about what the Mr Biden calls Russia’s “strategic defeat in Ukraine.”
Mr. Biden often says that Russia is already defeated. But the fear that pervades the seven major democracies here is that unless the counter-offensive proves very successful, Ukraine will plunge into a bloody, frozen conflict in which the best hope would be a ceasefire, reminiscent of the conflict that a ended the fighting on the Korean Peninsula 70 years ago this summer.
Such a confrontation seemed almost unthinkable in 1997, when President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain invited Russia to become a full member of the group and extend it — for nearly two decades — to the G8. Russia was “suspended” after annexing Crimea in 2014 and withdrew from the group three years later.
With his troops already trying to destroy Russian arms depots ahead of the counter-offensive, Mr. Zelensky has just completed a series of rapid-fire visits to European capitals to rally support for continued heavy spending on armaments and aid. He is expected to address leaders in Hiroshima virtually, but there have been talks behind the scenes about the risk of bringing him in person to the other side of the world to make his case.
Anyway, he will have a large audience. In addition to India, the leaders of Australia, South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia and Vietnam will also be present as guests. It is part of a broader strategy by Mr Biden and his allies to attract nations that, to varying degrees, have denounced the war in Ukraine, refuse to condemn Russia too harshly, enthusiastically enforce sanctions or arms to Ukraine.
Some core members are trying to weaponize Mr. Zelensky in ways that may exceed Mr. Biden’s willingness. While in Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hugged Mr Zelensky in a bear hug and told reporters, “They need the continued support of the international community to defend themselves against the barrage of unrelenting and random attacks that have been their daily. reality for more than a year. We must not abandon them.”
Britain and the Netherlands have pressured Washington to allow Ukraine to begin training in the use of F-16 fighter jets. But just as Mr. Biden was initially reluctant to hand over HIMARS and Patriot missile batteries and other technologies, he was wary of the F-16, an aircraft that could easily reach and hit the Kremlin.
So it seems that the United States will argue at Hiroshima that the fighter jets, while symbolically impressive, would be so expensive that they would get the prize of sending many usable, low-cost systems, including the air defenses that have proved surprisingly successful at capturing incoming Russian missiles. The apparent damage to at least part of a new Patriot missile battery in Kiev this week has underlined that such systems are costly.
Mr Biden has consistently been cautious – too cautious in the mind of Mr Zelensky and some NATO allies – about giving Ukraine weapons that he believes could lead to a rapid escalation of the war and renewed threats from the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin, to use a tactical nuclear weapon.
Britain just started giving Ukraine another precision weapon with longer range than the US-supplied HIMARS, a missile system called Storm Shadow. British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly told reporters in Washington last week that Mr Putin’s threats of escalation now sound more hollow and that these are “gateways where they need to go”.
For Mr. Kishida, the host, navigating the nuclear issues will be extremely difficult. The summit begins with a visit by Mr. Biden to the landmark atomic dome, making him the second US president to see the site of the atomic bombings ordered by President Harry S. Truman. (President Obama came in 2016 and Mr. Kishida was one of his guides to the site.)
Like many Japanese political leaders, Mr. Kishida has pushed for the phasing out of nuclear weapons throughout his career. But he and other Japanese politicians also admit that Mr Putin’s threats have made US “expanded deterrence” under its nuclear umbrella more important to Japanese strategy than it has been in years.
G7 officials will also grapple with the downward spiral in China-United States relations. Mr. Sullivan, the national security adviser, spent two days in Vienna last week with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign affairs official, in what was widely described as an attempt to restart communications following the US decision to to bring down a Chinese surveillance balloon. off the coast of South Carolina.
Officials have said little about the meeting, but it appears China has told Mr Sullivan that they are open again to visits from Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and eventually Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.
Mr Biden, who canceled extra stops on this trip in Papua New Guinea and Australia on Tuesday so he can return to the United States on Sunday to handle debt ceiling negotiations, said on Wednesday he was trying to meet the Chinese leader again , Xi Jinping. That is a sign that the freeze in relations of recent months is beginning to ease, even as the fundamental dynamic between the United States and China, a growing nuclear power, has yet to change.
