I think the key point here is that steps toward distributed global influence have been underway for quite some time. Convening the G20 is recognition of change, not cause of change.

This is a major event in that process, but crediting Bush with creating an inclusive global community (deliberatly or otherwise) is a bit of a stretch.

Beggars cannot be choosers: President Bush had to invite countries that had money to invest in the saving of the international financial system. The big boys among the G7 countries are the overwhelmed epicenters of the crisis. China, Brazil, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia are the countries with the immense currency reserves.

I think you’re right that the G7 would have been the wrong body, and that therefore Bush made the right choice by convening the G20. But Bush could easily have made the wrong choice, and as Stephen Grenville has argued, there are prominent voices pushing against the G20 solution.

So it’s not as if Bush had no agency here. He had a choice and he made it. Whether that choice was ‘purposefully’ intended to usher in a multi-polar regime is more open to doubt. I don’t argue that Bush did it ‘purposefully, but that it may be the ultimate effect.

Bush’s choice of the G20 over the G7 is due to the recognition in Washington and pretty much everywhere else that the G7, even if China came along, could not solve the current problem. A G7 plus China would have China as an odd man out and make for a greatly unbalanced occasion.

It’s a stretch to give too much credit to Bush for that decision: the reality is that however he might have wished, there was nowhere else to go, in his sunset moment.

See my response here: http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2008/11/More-on-Bush-and-the-G20.aspx

Just a case of poor expression on my part, I think.