If Donald Trump was bent on ruining South Africa’s Group of 20 Summit as part of his overarching attack on the multilateral order, let it be said that he didn’t succeed — but he widened the cracks.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, beset by Trump’s false claims of White genocide in his country and a U.S. boycott, managed to get the rest of the G-20 to agree to a declaration, despite American threats. That it endorsed all the themes the Trump administration has spent the year attacking — global solidarity, equality, sustainability — led one national newspaper to headline the first day: a “Bloody Nose for Trump.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney echoed Ramaphosa when he said the world will move on without the U.S. — particularly, perhaps, during a month in which Trump seems increasingly on his way to being a lame duck.

The summit “brought together nations representing three-quarters of the world’s population, two-thirds of global GDP and three-quarters of the world’s trade, and that’s without the United States formally attending,” Carney told a press conference on Sunday at the summit in Johannesburg. “It’s a reminder that the center of gravity in the global economy is shifting.”

Still, there was plenty of evidence that Trump retains his clout. There was the first family photo, which was down several world leaders who’d skipped the proceedings. As well as Trump, that included China’s President Xi Jinping. One of those who did make the trip was French President Emmanuel Macron, who in his opening remarks waxed prophetically: “We must also recognize that the G-20 may be reaching the end of a cycle.”

That became increasingly clear as the weekend wore on, and the splintering of the multilateral order came into focus with Trump’s Ukraine peace plan. In its current form, it gives Russia almost everything it wants and left European leaders trying to formulate a response on the sidelines in Johannesburg.

“We are struggling to have a common standard on geopolitical crises,” Macron in his opening remarks to the summit. He could have been referring to the U.S.-EU schism over Ukraine, but he may as well have been talking about the Western-Rest of World divide over that crisis, and others.

At the summit, it was Western leaders huddling to determine how to respond to Trump. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted her own G7 mini-family photo, of the wealthiest countries minus the U.S. dealing with the issue. Their Global South counterparts held their own side meetings.

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan used his time at the podium to talk about what he termed a genocide in Gaza; Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expressed concerns about the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean near Venezuela.

The habit of countries clustering at G-20s “has gotten much worse with the U.S. and China both no longer interested in multi-lateral institutions,” said Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, South Asia head for Eurasia Group. “The EU is concerned about Ukraine, whereas the developing world is concerned about debt burden, trade, energy transition and emerging technologies.”

To that end, India, Brazil and South Africa revived their Brics-lite triad with a meeting between the three heads of state. India’s Narendra Modi met a dozen world leaders on the sidelines. The UK and Indonesia inked a £4 billion ($5.2 billion) maritime deal. India, Australia and Canada used the G-20 summit to launch a new partnership to develop emerging technologies. Ramaphosa even managed to keep African debt reduction on the agenda.

“The world is reorganizing itself. You could see it here that new connections are emerging,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at a press conference on Sunday. “The U.S. has played no role in all of this. I don’t think it was a wise decision on the part of the U.S. to be absent here.”

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(With assistance from Sudhi Ranjan Sen, Michael Nienaber, Colum Murphy, Daniel Carvalho and Mike Cohen.)

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