The G20 finance ministers and central bank governors are meeting in Bangkok this week alongside the IMF and World Bank annual meetings, but the gathering feels less like coordination and more like a group therapy session for a global economy nobody can steer. The US-Israel war on Iran, now eight months into its disruption of Strait of Hormuz shipping, has pushed crude above $100 a barrel and turned energy prices into a permanent fiscal emergency for import-dependent economies across Asia and the Gulf. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — the top economic official of the world's largest economy and the country currently holding the G20 presidency — is not attending. Washington cites 'domestic engagements' and is sending deputies Francis Brooke and Erin Browne instead. The signal is hard to misread: the chair of the forum doesn't think the forum matters enough to show up, even as the economic crisis it should address was largely catalyzed by US-backed military action. Australia's Treasurer Jim Chalmers put the central tension plainly: 'The war in the Middle East is having a devastating economic impact and is pushing up fuel prices, inflation and interest rates around the world.' He's calling for the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened — a demand that sounds reasonable in an economic communiqué and entirely disconnected from the military reality on the ground. The gap between what finance ministers can discuss and what would actually fix the problem is the story. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva added a second alarm on Wednesday, warning that mounting sovereign debt — now exceeding 100 percent of GDP in the US, Canada, Japan, Italy, and France — poses a systemic threat and that there is no 'magic' formula to avoid tax hikes or spending cuts. Debt at this scale under wartime energy prices is a compounding trap: governments borrow to cushion fuel costs, which raises rates, which raises borrowing costs, which narrows fiscal space further. The US-China trade fight continues to run as a parallel track. Bessent, despite skipping the meetings, issued a statement calling on the IMF to scrutinize 'non-market policies and practices and exchange rates' driving 'external imbalances' — diplomatic language for China's $938 billion cumulative trade surplus through September. Trump has long framed this as proof the system is rigged against US manufacturers. China, for its part, blocked a joint communiqué at the last G20 finance ministers meeting in Asheville over trade language. The precedent is set: no consensus statement is likely from Bangkok either. What emerges from this picture is a multilateral system that cannot produce outcomes. The G20 was created in 1999 to coordinate responses to financial crises. Now it meets during the most consequential energy shock in a generation, and the host country's top official doesn't attend, the biggest bilateral trade relationship is in open conflict, and the last meeting ended without even a shared statement. These institutions still convene. They no longer converge. The Bangkok meetings will feed into a leaders' summit in Miami on December 14-15, but the real question is whether any agreement reached there will mean anything absent the capacity to enforce it. The Bretton Woods architecture — IMF, World Bank, coordinated monetary policy — was designed for a world where the major powers agreed on the rules. That world ended some time ago; these meetings are the institutional afterimage.
