奥巴马斡旋胡锦涛与萨科齐握手
Handshake Brokered By Obama Saves DayUltimately it boiled down to an Obama-brokered handshake between Hu Jintao and Nicolas Sarkozy, according to US officials. The reality may be more prosaic, and the agreement of a final summit text on Thursday was the culmination of weeks of work by officials from 20 countries. But Barack Obama's self-effacing approach to summitry – one that was on Thursday remarked upon by several non-US officials – certainly did no harm.
According to senior US officials, towards the end of the summit Mr Obama pulled Mr Sarkozy and Mr Hu aside in full view of the plenary session with several officials and translators in tow.
The US president then brokered a compromise between his Chinese and French counterparts on an issue so arcane and inconsequential that it is hard to believe failure to have done so would have led to a collapse of the summit.
According to the account, confirmed by non-US officials, Mr Obama got the two leaders to agree that the G20 would “take note” of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development list of rogue offshore tax havens rather than “endorse” that list.
This allowed the Chinese to save face, since they do not belong to the 30-member Paris-based OECD. And it allowed Mr Sarkozy to claim back home that he had chalked up a blow against Anglo-Saxon capitalism.
In fact everybody, including Mr Obama and Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, who on Thursday declared an end to the “Washington consensus”, has been reading the funeral rites of old-style unregulated financial markets and Thursday's nine-page communiqué spelt out some of the detail. More importantly for Mr Obama, he can now claim back home that he has led the global effort to tackle the global recession while staving off any attempt to pin the blame on the US.
奥巴马斡旋胡锦涛与萨科齐握手
据美国官员称，G20峰会的重点归结起来就是在奥巴马斡旋下胡锦涛和尼古拉·萨科齐的一次握手。事实或许要更加乏味，周四公布的峰会协议的最终版本是20个国家的官员数周努力工作的结果。但巴拉克·奥巴马在峰会上的低调作风——周四有数位非美国官员提到了这一点——肯定没有什么坏处。
据美国高级政府官员表示，峰会接近尾声之时，奥巴马将萨科齐和胡锦涛拉到一旁，身边还有几位官员和翻译陪同，全体与会者都看到了这一幕。
随后，美国总统扮演了中间人，使中国和法国的国家首脑就一个无关紧要的问题达成妥协。这是一个微不足道的问题，人们很难相信，如果中法两国未能就此达成妥协，那么整个峰会就会流产。
据说，奥巴马让两国领导人同意，20国集团将会“参考”经合组织的流氓离岸避税天堂名单，而不是“认可”这个名单。这个说法得到了非美国官员的证实。
这让中国人保全了颜面，因为中国并不是总部位于巴黎的经合组织30个成员国之一。它也让萨科齐回国后可以宣称，自己对盎格鲁撒克逊式的资本主义予以了一次打击。
事实上，所有人，包括奥巴马和周四宣布“华盛顿共识”时代已经终结的英国首相戈登·布朗，都一直在研究旧式无监管金融市场的葬礼礼仪，而周四长达9页的峰会公报也透露了部分细节。对奥巴马来说更重要的是，现在他回国后可以宣称，自己在解决全球经济衰退的全球努力中发挥了领导作用，同时击退了任何将责任归咎于美国的企图。
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