Why Retailers Should Care About the G20

By [ Sung Chang ]
11/18/2025

Many of the world’s leaders will descend this weekend on Johannesburg, South Africa, convening the annual G20 summit. The U.S. delegation will be more than 8,000 miles away, not attending the global confab. So why should retailers care that the United States is boycotting the summit?

More reasons than you’d think.

The G20 is a forum where world leaders discuss how to tackle the biggest global challenges. More importantly, the forum’s primary goal is to promote global economic growth. It is where leaders try to provide a longer-term strategy, or at least a common understanding, on the most pressing economic challenges and opportunities. Instead of driving the conversation, U.S. officials will be observing from an ocean away.

Retailers hunger for predictability in the U.S. trade agenda. Since April, we have seen waves of tariffs from IEEPA to a stream of area code-like actions including 301s, 232s, followed by bilateral trade “deals” announced by the White House. Uncertainty persists, especially with much of the IEEPA tariffs facing legal scrutiny. Working with allies at the G20 is an opportunity to deliver needed certainty on trade and related issues.

The administration has been pushing trading partners to align on U.S. economic and national security objectives. We saw this in the U.S.–Malaysia trade agreement announced in October, where Malaysia committed to follow the United States on matters of economic restrictions and sanctions against third countries. We also saw this in the critical minerals deals the United States signed with Australia, Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand. And increasingly, the administration is using trade to “friendshore” key technology supply chains.

The G20 should be a primary vehicle to coordinate these and other efforts—but no U.S. officials will be in Johannesburg. U.S. negotiators are certainly capable of negotiating bilateral arrangements with trading partners, but in the absence of increased regional and plurilateral cooperation, such efforts risk missing the mark on the United States authoring the next chapter of the global trading order. For example, the European Union has publicly said it wants to work with the United States and others on a mechanism to better regulate trade in the steel and aluminum sectors to address overcapacity issues, mainly from China. There are other forums to address the topic, including the OECD Steel Committee. But those forums arguably do not have the breadth of economies to effectively deal with existential issues like industrial overcapacity.

The G20, and other similar organizations, are far from perfect. As a former U.S. trade negotiator who led multiple U.S. delegations to Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), I can attest to that. But I can also tell you that when the United States speaks, the room listens. In the absence of a U.S. delegation, the gap widens for other voices — notably China — to dictate the agenda and discussion. Not only are there plenary meetings with the full membership, summits like this allow smaller groups of leaders and delegations to huddle on the margins to get a lot of work done. Even if the outcomes are often high-level and non-binding, including the Leaders Declaration, there is an opportunity to be the center of gravity and paint an outline in favorable terms.

For the administration, a common thread around its trade agenda is using tariffs to gain leverage. Whether it is obtaining purchase and investment commitments or addressing longstanding non-tariff barriers, the desired result is to rewrite the trade rules to extract the maximum concessions from trading partners. We will see the extent to which this approach provides retailers with the necessary predictability and stability. But the short-term volatility from the bilateral approach — on tariffs and other issues — could be remedied through a vehicle like the G20 by hammering out common ground with important trading partners, including crucial developing economies like Brazil and Indonesia. This is not like choosing between pumpkin and pecan pies — bilateral deals can work in tandem with plurilateral diplomacy.

In business terms, the G20 can serve as an annual letter to shareholders, a diagnosis and prescription on where we are and where we are going. That letter, at least for this year’s G20 summit, is wide open.