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Whether he’s lobbying for Airbus to sell aircraft to Bangladesh or scouring for rare earths in Mongolia, French President Emmanuel Macron is on the offensive in Asia, pitching France as a useful alternative to bigger powers.

After two days of high-level talks with G20 leaders in New Delhi, where he was treated to lunch with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Macron set off for neighbouring Bangladesh, a fast-growing South Asian nation of 170 million people.

The two-day stopover in Dhaka was part of a French strategy to target mid-sized countries in a region where superpowers such as China, Russia or the U.S. are jostling for influence.

"In a region facing new imperialism, we want to propose a third way," Macron told Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina after landing in a sweltering Dhaka late on Sunday.

"All our strategy is focused on strengthening the independence and the strategic autonomy of our friends to give them the 'freedom of sovereignty'," Macron said.

The French leader, who Hasina called "a breath of fresh air in international politics", was hot on the heels of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who visited Bangladesh a few days before the G20 summit.

Russia is building a nuclear power plant in Bangladesh, a $13 billion project financed by a Russian government loan.

The French are also trying to sell their nuclear expertise, even if a power plant contract is a more distant prospect.

They are making more progress in the aerospace sector, however. In a country long dominated by Boeing, Macron on Monday clinched a deal for Airbus to sell 10 A-350 aircraft to national flagship carrier Biman Bangladesh Airlines Ltd.

The Bangladesh trip comes after a series of short but high-level trips by Macron this year to Asian nations such as Mongolia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka.

Macron, who launched France's Indo-Pacific strategy in 2018, the first European country to do so, has talked of Europe as a "third way" in a region increasingly under the sway of China-U.S. rivalry.

"We’re a country of 60 million, so of course we can’t compete head-on with China," a French diplomat told Reuters.

"But although the U.S. are our allies, we have our own interest and can help countries in the region diversifying their alliances, so they’re not reliant on one country alone." (Reuters)

The Group of 20 major economies reached a hard-fought compromise over the war in Ukraine and papered over other key differences in a summit declaration at the weekend, presenting few concrete achievements in its core remit of responses to global financial issues.

Diplomats and analysts said the surprise consensus in the summit statement on the Russia-Ukraine conflict avoided a split in the group, and the inclusion of the African Union as a new member represented a victory for host India and for developing economies, but the rest was disappointing.

"The G20 has been at its best as a multilateral forum when it can forge consensus - not just on language, but on action - to deal with serious global issues, such as global financial crises," said Michael Froman, president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

"Looking ahead, the focus should be on that, not on the statement per se," said Froman, a former U.S. trade representative who has also worked as Washington’s G20 and G8 negotiator.

The summit declaration avoided condemning Russia for the war in Ukraine but highlighted the human suffering the conflict had caused and called on all states not to use force to grab territory.

Few had expected the G20 to reach a consensus on the document, let alone on the first afternoon of the two-day summit, as the group had failed to agree on a single communique at the 20 or so ministerial meetings this year due to the hardened stance on the war.

A failure to agree on a summit declaration would have signalled that the G20 was split, perhaps irrevocably, between the West on one side and China and Russia on the other, analysts said.

And with Beijing pushing to reshuffle the world order by expanding groupings such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, G20 could have ended up becoming irrelevant, they said.

DIFFICULT SUMMIT

G20 was set up as a platform of finance ministers and central bank governors in 1999 to counter the effects of the Asian financial crisis and the meeting was expanded to include leaders after the global financial crisis in 2008.

Its primary role of coordinating responses to economic issues - including global taxation and helping low-income nations manage their debt burden under the Common Framework in recent years - has been diluted because the need to seek a consensus has led to weak agreements, some analysts said.

This year, resolving differences on the Ukraine war and other issues took up a lengthy 25 days of negotiations, including in the week leading up to the summit, Svetlana Lukash, the Russian G20 sherpa, or government negotiator, was quoted as saying by Russian news agency Interfax.

"This was one of the most difficult G20 summits in the almost twenty-year history of the forum," Lukash said.

The G20 process requires consensus on all decisions which means it will pursue the “lowest common denominator”, said Patryk Kugiel, a senior analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw.

“Therefore, we do not have any concrete and substantial decisions, commitments, pledges from G20 on any of the pressing global challenges, from climate change to debt,” Kugiel added. “It makes the forum ineffective, even useless.”

At the New Delhi gathering, the leaders agreed to pursue tripling renewable energy capacity globally by 2030 and accepted the need to phase-down unabated coal power.

However, they set no timetable and said the use of coal had to be wound down in line with national circumstances.

Coal, which is being phased out of the power system in many industrialised nations, is still a vital fuel in many developing economies and may remain so for decades to come.

The meeting also agreed to address debt vulnerabilities of poor countries and strengthen and reform multilateral development banks, but without setting any concrete goals.

There was also no progress on getting Russia to return to the Black Sea initiative although the declaration called for the safe flow of grain, food and fertiliser from both Ukraine and Russia.

FEAR OF DIVISION, DISAPPOINTMENT

For most major G20 members though, the summit declaration appeared to be a major gain since it reached a consensus on acceptable language to refer to the war in Ukraine.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who represented Russia at the summit in place of the absent President Vladimir Putin, said India's presidency, "probably for the first time during the entire G20 existence, has truly consolidated G20 participants from the Global South".

Diplomats have said negotiators from India, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa drove the consensus in the summit document.

The U.S., Germany and Britain all lauded the declaration.

There was no official word from China but its state-run news agency Xinhua, without referring to the declaration, said in a commentary on Saturday that G20 could still be made to work.

China's presence was muted at the meeting with President Xi Jinping staying away and Beijing represented by Premier Li Qiang, who took his post in March this year.

A French official who was present at the summit said “G20 actually remains a club that's capable of forging consensus between north and south and east and west”.

Despite the lack of concrete progress, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, India's chief G20 coordinator, said the meeting did take the group forward.

“The concerns of the developing world are so great that if you failed ... they would have to face much greater issues of division and, I would say, even disappointment,” he told Reuters. (Reuters)

A Chinese naval formation led by the aircraft carrier Shandong passed 60 nautical miles (111km) to Taiwan's southeast on Monday and entered the western Pacific for training, the island's defence ministry said.

The ministry said that beginning at 5:40 a.m., it also spotted 11 Chinese military aircraft, including J-16 fighters, in Taiwan's air defence identification zone and that its forces had made an "appropriate response".

The Shandong, commissioned in 2019, participated in Chinese military drills around Taiwan in April, operating in the western Pacific. It also sailed through the Taiwan Strait in June.

A U.S. and a Canadian warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Saturday, marking the second such joint mission since June and coinciding with the leaders of both countries attending the G20 summit in India.

China, which has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control, has stepped up military activities near the democratically governed island, responding to what it calls "collusion" between Taiwan and the United States.

Taiwan strongly disputes Beijing's sovereignty claims. (Reuters)

Executives at top U.S. and Vietnamese firms in the semiconductor, tech and aviation sectors met on Monday seeking to forge business partnerships during U.S. President Joe Biden's visit to Hanoi which has seen new deals on on planes and AI.

Senior executives from Google (GOOGL.O), Intel (INTC.O), Amkor (AMKR.O), Marvell (MRVL.O), GlobalFoundries (GFS.O) and Boeing (BA.N) attended the Vietnam-U.S. Innovation & Investment Summit, according to the meeting agenda.

From Vietnam, there were executives from half a dozen companies, including Nasdaq-listed electric car maker VinFast , flag carrier Vietnam Airlines (HVN.HM), tech company FPT (FPT.HM), MoMo, the country's biggest e-wallet by users, as well as internet firm VNG, which filed in August for a U.S. IPO.

Biden reiterated at the meeting that the two countries were deepening cooperation in cloud computing, semiconductors and artificial intelligence, and stressed Vietnam was crucial for critical minerals supplies.

The country has the world's second-biggest estimated deposits of rare earths, which are used in electric vehicles and wind turbines.

The meeting, which followed a historic upgrade of diplomatic relations agreed on Sunday, underscored U.S. desire to boost Vietnam's global role. This is particularly so in chipmaking with Washington seeking to reduce the sector's exposure to China-linked risks, including trade friction and tensions over Taiwan.

Deals unveiled by the White House during the trip include Vietnam Airlines' purchase of 50 Boeing 737 Max jets, in an agreement that it said was worth $7.8 billion, in line with an earlier Reuters report.

The White House also announced plans by Microsoft (MSFT.O) to make a "generative AI-based solution tailored for Vietnam and emerging markets."

Nvidia (NVDA.O) will also partner with Vietnam's FPT, Viettel and Vingroup (VIC.HM), VinFast's parent company, on AI in the country, it said.

The White House also highlighted the number of chip-related investments by U.S. firms in Vietnam, including plans by Marvell and Synopsys (SNPS.O) to build chip design centres in the country.

A new $1.6 billion Amkor factory near Hanoi that will assemble, package and test chips is due to start operations in October, it added.

The investment value is on par with Intel's $1.5 billion chip assembling plant in the south of the country - the company's biggest worldwide. Sources said earlier this year that it may be expanded.

U.S. conglomerate Honeywell (HON.O) will cooperate with a Vietnamese partner to launch a pilot project to develop Vietnam's first battery energy storage system, the White House also said.

U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken and Vietnam's investment minister Nguyen Chi Dung chaired the meeting, which was followed by discussions with Biden and Vietnam's Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh.

Dung also told the meeting that he hoped Vietnamese companies could expand in the United States and join the globlal supply chain, according to a government statement. (Reuters)