As the G20 leaders assembled that afternoon in Buckingham Palace, it was a freak show of outsized personalities. When he was not grandstanding, Sarkozy was ostentatiously busy on his cell phone. Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner reprised her anticapitalist posturing from Washington. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi was noisily desperate to attract Obama’s attention. Otherwise, he was prone to nodding off. Merkel was unflappable and hard to budge. The Chinese dug in hard on their negotiating position. Several heads of government were unable to communicate fluently in English and most had
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