By Alexander Ward, Matt Berg and Eric Bazail-Eimil

The biggest moment ahead of the G20's official start was the arrival of President Joe Biden, who was warmly greeted by senior Indian officials. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

With help from Connor O’Brien, Paul McLeary, Phelim Kine and Daniel Lippman

Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Matt

NEW DELHI — The G20 may officially be starting Saturday, but jockeying is already underway here in the steamy Indian capital.

The biggest moment was the arrival of President JOE BIDEN, who was warmly greeted with dances, senior Indian officials and, curiously, ED SHEERAN’s “Shape of You” blaring over the loudspeaker. Biden also found time to chat with the 12-year-old daughter of U.S. Ambassador to India ERIC GARCETTI on the tarmac soon after stepping off Air Force One.

Then it was off to Indian Prime Minister NARENDRA MODI’s residence for a nearly 50-minute bilateral meeting. The two leaders and their teams discussed their relationship in the Quad, a drone deal, reforming multilateral institutions, technology, China and the upcoming summit.

A sign of how important the relationship has become is who flanked their bosses. Garcetti, national security adviser JAKE SULLIVAN, Treasury Secretary JANET YELLEN and Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN sat on the American side while Indian Minister of External Affairs SUBRAHMANYAM JAISHANKAR and Modi’s top natsec aide AJIT DOVAL line up across their counterparts.

With China’s XI JINPING skipping the G20 altogether, it appears that Team Biden and Team Modi are working to strengthen ties and signal that Beijing doesn’t loom so large. In a joint statement after the meeting, both sides “pledged to sustain the high-level of engagement between our governments.”

An early theme ahead of the G20, though, is limited press access. The pool following Biden wanted at least some moments to cover the important chat. But speaking to reporters on the way to India, Sullivan indicated American journalists might not get the access they’re accustomed to.

“We in the U.S. government work hard to ensure and obtain access for U.S. journalists to everything the president does,” he said. “What we can pledge to you is what’s in our control, which is ensuring that we are transparent and comprehensive in our readout of what the two leaders discussed, which we will.”

On Friday, the pool was left out in the press vans, unable to see Biden enter the residence. The reporters didn’t even get bathroom access.

So as it stands, all things are going pretty smoothly for Biden and Modi. But the ability to report on their bromantic moment was limited, and there’s a worry that further press restrictions will persist through the weekend’s events.

Before they kick off, though, make sure you read some great analyses by our colleagues.

Because we barely passed economics in college, our colleague GAVIN BADE outlines how the summit marks the most concerted effort by Washington in decades to win the favor of so-called developing nations with high debt burdens and poverty levels. Biden’s plan to win them over from China and Russia “is to buy them off” by financing their infrastructure projects, Gavin writes.

Both Xi and Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN opted to skip the meetings, and as our own NAHAL TOOSI astutely pointed out, sometimes, not showing up is the best way to grab attention.

One last thing: The 14-hour flight to Delhi was uneventful for your host except that a young Indian dance crew was also on the plane, leading the captain to congratulate them over for placing near the top in "America’s Got Talent."

The only issue, personally, was getting from the airport to the hotel as the G20 areas are shut down to traffic, causing long backups along some major thoroughfares in the city of 33 million people.

A message from Lockheed Martin:

Innovating at hypersonic speed.

Lockheed Martin is innovating with urgency to solve today’s hypersonic strike and defense challenges. We’re investing in the American hypersonic workforce and supplier base, to ensure our customers stay ready for what’s ahead. Learn more.

CHINA’S GOT A JOB FOR YOU: A top U.S. general warned that Beijing’s military is courting current and former servicemembers as trainers or consultants in an attempt to “fill the gaps” in China’s capabilities and take advantage of the Americans’ specialized knowledge, The Washington Post’s DAN LAMOTHE reports.

In a message to Air Force personnel today, Gen. CHARLES Q. BROWN JR., who heads the Air Force and is the nominee to lead the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said China is “targeting and recruiting U.S. and NATO-trained military talent across specialties and career fields.” It’s the Pentagon’s clearest attempt yet to call out China for its ploy to use international firms that hire Americans to relay Washington’s military tactics and skills.

“By essentially training the trainer, many of those who accept contracts with these foreign companies are eroding our national security, putting the very safety of their fellow servicemembers and the country at risk,” Brown wrote.

SLASHING TROOPS IN NIGER: The U.S. will reduce its troop presence in Niger by half, two Defense Department officials with direct knowledge of the move told our own LARA SELIGMAN. 

The pull back would be the first significant movement of U.S. troops out of Niger since a military junta seized power in late July. The Biden administration has yet to officially call the incident a “coup,” a label that would require ending military and other aid to the country. However, the Pentagon has suspended training operations with Nigerien forces. Meanwhile, flights out of Agadez, a U.S.-funded drone base key to hunting militants in the region, have been sporadic.

INSIDE THE SITUATION ROOM: NatSec Daily can confirm reports that the White House’s Situation Room’s makeover — a yearlong $50 million endeavor to revamp the West Wing’s highly sensitive meeting area for the administration’s national security team — smells like the inside of a new car.

“It looks more like Hollywood than it used to, is the most common response we get,” Marc Gustafson, a special assistant to the president and senior director of the Situation Room, told a group of reporters inside the legendary quarters (actually a collection of a few rooms) Thursday afternoon.

Last year, we said the Situation Room complex looks nowhere near as cool as it does on TV. We now stand corrected. Here’s what stood out to us most:

Safety first: Colloquially known in the White House as the “whizzer,” the rooms were “enhanced to the highest standard … to keep up with foreign adversaries,” Gustafson told us in the JFK room, where Biden and his team will gather and host virtual meetings with foreign leaders.

Most juicy details about what makes it secure are classified, and you can’t bring electronics to the ground-level quarters, and the same goes for most food and drinks. Contractors also dug five feet further into the ground to reconstruct the whizzer with fancier materials — a total gut job.

There’s also an upgraded Watch Floor — an operations center with dozens of flat-screen TVs and computer monitors where servicemembers monitor potential threats around the clock. Sadly, the screens displayed just a static image as journalists toured… smart move.

Poof! It’s gone: You’d recognize one room in the former WHSR as where President BARACK OBAMA and his team watched the news of OSAMA BIN LADEN’s death. That’s now gone. (Don’t worry — it was fully excavated and preserved, and will find its forever home in Obama’s presidential library, Gustafson said).

In its place are two small “breakout” rooms, where people like the secretary of State or Defense secretary might prepare for a meeting with Biden in the nearby JFK room, Gustafson said.

All about the aesthetics: While still a bit cramped, the series of rooms can no longer be be described as a “dungeon” as new leather chairs, sustainably harvested wooden walls, new lighting, screens implanted in the walls and glass panels that can be fogged with the press of a button adorn the space.

“It’s a marriage of the traditional and the modern,” Gustafson said.

What drew the most excitement was the large seal on the wall behind the head seat in the JFK room. It is attached to a magnetic base, so it can be switched out for the seal of whoever is leading the meeting. (There’s one from the president and vice president, with generic executive office seals for others — and they’re stored in their own nearby “seal closet.”)

DRINKS WITH NATSEC DAILY: At the end of every long, hard week, we like to highlight how a prominent member of Washington’s national security scene prefers to unwind with a drink.

Today, we’re featuring STEVEN COOK, a senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“If I were in D.C., I would go old school: Greyhound at Fox & Hounds on 17th Street, NW. I think I went there for the first time during the summer of 1989. It remains a favorite,” he said.

Cheers, Steve!

Enter the “room where it happens”, where global power players shape policy and politics, with Power Play. POLITICO’s brand-new podcast will host conversations with the leaders and power players shaping the biggest ideas and driving the global conversations, moderated by award-winning journalist Anne McElvoy. Sign up today to be notified of the first episodes in September – click here.

IT’S FRIDAY. WELCOME TO THE WEEKEND: Thanks for tuning in to NatSec Daily. This space is reserved for the top U.S. and foreign officials, the lawmakers, the lobbyists, the experts and the people like you who care about how the natsec sausage gets made. Aim your tips and comments at [email protected] and [email protected], and follow us on X at @alexbward and @mattberg33.

While you’re at it, follow the rest of POLITICO’s national security team: @nahaltoosi, @PhelimKine, @laraseligman, @connorobrienNH, @paulmcleary, @leehudson, @magmill95, @johnnysaks130, @ErinBanco, @reporterjoe, @JGedeon1 and @ebazaileimil.

MEAN ABOUT GREEN: GOP presidential contender VIVEK RAMASWAMY criticized the Biden administration for sending money to Ukraine to bolster its green energy, repeating the false claim that climate change agenda is a “hoax.”

“Ukraine needs a peace deal, NOT a Green New Deal,” Ramaswamy posted on X today. “The climate change agenda is a hoax: more people die of bad climate policies than climate change itself.”

On Wednesday, Blinken pledged to invest $520 million in “making Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, more than half of which has been destroyed by Russia, cleaner, more resilient and more integrated with Europe.” It’s unclear how much of that is earmarked for green energy specifically.

It’s worth noting that for Ramaswamy’s last point, which the tech entrepreneur has repeated before, his team refused to provide any data to back it up — and it proved impossible to clarify what stats he was referring to.

UKRAINE-MUSK ROW GROWS: The long-simmering feud between Kyiv and tech billionaire ELON MUSK reached a new flashpoint today, after a biography of the billionaire by author WALTER ISAACSON revealed that the mogul ordered his engineers to disable Starlink satellite communications near the coast of Russian-occupied Crimea, our own CLAUDIA CHIAPPA reports.

It is believed that the move foiled a Ukrainian effort to attack the Russian navy in Sevastopol. Posting on X, Musk defended his actions, saying that “there was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol” and that “if I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

“By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via #Starlink interference, @elonmusk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, children are being killed,” Ukrainian presidential adviser MYKHAILO PODOLYAK posted in response to the revelations.

SHOAL PATROL: A rusted-out World War II-era ship stuck atop an underwater shoal in the South China Sea has emerged as a flashpoint pitting China’s territorial claims against a renewed American commitment to allies in the region, our own PAUL McLEARY and PHELIM KINE write in.

For the second time in a month, Beijing and Manilla came head-to-head today over the ship and the underwater landmass it is marooned on. Several Chinese coast guard ships and Chinese maritime militia boats tried to block two Philippine ships from approaching the Sierra Madre transport ship, which Manilla ran aground on the Second Thomas Shoal in 1999 to solidify its claim.

China has repeatedly tried to disrupt resupply missions for a small contingent of Marines stationed on the ship. Last month, Chinese ships attacked the boats with water cannons — as an American P-8 surveillance plane circling low over the Chinese vessels.

There was no violence in today’s incident, and despite some close sailing, the Philippine ships made it through.

The stepped up Chinese actions come as officials in Manilla are considering building hardened structures on the shoal, also known as Ayungin Shoal, to house its troops and make resupply easier.

“It is a proposal that should be taken seriously,” Philippine Sen. RISA HONTIVEROS told NatSec Daily. “We know that Beijing has her eye on Ayungin, considering how willing it has been to fire a water cannon or shine a military grade laser at Philippine personnel en route to the Sierra Madre.

NK SUBS GO NUCLEAR: North Korea is claiming it has produced a “tactical nuclear attack submarine,” The Washington Post’s MIN JOO KIM reports. The announcement comes as Pyongyang has resigned itself to the presence of debilitating international sanctions and seeks to continue expanding its nuclear weapons program at all costs.

Leader KIM JONG UN described a “plan to remodel existing medium-sized submarines into offensive ones loaded with tactical nuclear weapons to play an important role in the modern warfare,” according to North Korean state media. Kim also described it as a “low-cost ultra-modernization strategy.”

MANAGING UP: Former officials who successfully recommended eliminating the Pentagon's chief management officer are cautioning lawmakers against bringing the position back, our colleague CONNOR O'BRIEN scooped (for Pros!).

Reviving the post, which Congress eliminated three years ago, will be a live issue in defense negotiations this fall after Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) got a provision to reinstate the CMO added to the Senate NDAA. Three former members of the Defense Business Board told lawmakers in a letter that bringing it back would be "needlessly expensive and ill-advised" after their 2020 study argued the office was ineffective at producing significant efficiencies and savings in DOD’s business processes.

"Our strongly considered views then are the same as now that this office served little useful purpose and should remain closed," wrote ARNOLD PUNARO, ATUL VASHISTHA and MICHAEL BAYER.

SINK OR SWIM: The Senate Armed Services Committee’s top Republican, Mississippi Sen. ROGER WICKER, wants the White House to ask Congress for more submarine industrial base money — and he wants it done now, our friends at Morning Defense (for Pros!) report.

Next week, Wicker plans to raise the issue again at SASC’s confirmation hearing for Biden’s pick for chief of naval operations, Adm. LISA FRANCHETTI, he told MD.

He’s leading a group of Republicans who argue that the administration will not be able to both meet the Navy’s needs and make Virginia-class submarines for Australia, as laid out in the three-nation AUKUS agreement. That is, unless Washington pays to expand America’s capacity to build subs.

“The next move has to come from the administration. If they mean what they say, let’s get started,” Wicker said. “The national security experts in the administration will tell you that Ukraine has shown us that our industrial base isn't able to move fast enough. That's true, doubly so, when it comes to our submarine industrial base.”

JOIN US ON 9/12 FOR A TALK ON THE NEW AGE OF TRAVELING: In this new era of American travel, trending preferences like wellness tourism, alternative lodging and work-from-anywhere culture provide new but challenging opportunities for industry and policy leaders alike. Join POLITICO on Sept. 12 for an expert discussion examining how the resilience of the tourism and travel industries is driving post-pandemic recovery. REGISTER HERE.

‘BLOODY PROVOCATIONS’: Ukraine’s government is keeping a close eye out for violence as Russia begins holding elections in occupied territory today and over the weekend, according to a document obtained by NatSec Daily.

“There is a real threat of bloody provocations at the so-called ‘polling stations’ during pseudo-elections with the aim of accusing Ukraine of terrorism and additionally ‘baptizing’ the propaganda show with sacrifices,” according to a document sent to Ukrainian officials from the country’s Center for Strategic Communication and Information Security.

The document also warned that “collaborating with the occupiers” in the elections, which will take place in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson oblasts and Crimea, is a crime — and that “foreigners and collaborators will not enjoy their ‘positions’ for long” as Ukraine aims to take back the territories.

Read: How the Pentagon assesses Ukraine’s progress in The Economist

— TERENCE KELLEY has been tapped to be West Point’s public affairs officer. He previously worked as the Army’s media relations director.

— CAROLINE EDWARDS has been promoted to sergeant in the Capitol Police force. She previously was an officer (and notably testified before the Jan. 6 committee last year).

— ZALMAY KHALILZAD, The National Interest: America Cannot Dismiss China’s 10-Dash Map

— ANTON TROIANOVSKI, DECLAN WALSH, ERIC SCHMITT, VIVIAN YEE and JULIAN  BARNES, The New York Times: After Prigozhin’s Death, a High-Stakes Scramble for His Empire

— KIM KARDASHIAN and ERIC ESRAILIAN, Rolling Stone: My Plea to Joe Biden to Stop Another Armenian Genocide

— The Center for Global Development and the Policy Center for the New South, 4:30 a.m.: A virtual conference on "perspectives of the global south on multilateral development bank reform: a high-level conference”

— The Pentagon, 8 a.m.: The annual Sept. 11 observance

— The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs, 12 p.m.: A discussion with AMANDA BENNETT, CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media

— The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 12 p.m.: Oslo at 30: Looking Back and Ahead

— The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1 p.m.: U.S.-Republic of Korea Bilateral Dialogue for the Next 70 Years of the U.S.-ROK Alliance

— The Brookings Institution, 3 p.m.: The state of terrorism around the world

Thanks to our editor, Heidi Vogt, who would censor us all if she could.

We also thank our producer, Emily Lussier, who gets access anywhere.

A message from Lockheed Martin:

Innovating at hypersonic speed.

Lockheed Martin is innovating with urgency to solve today’s hypersonic strike and defense challenges. We’re investing in the American hypersonic workforce and supplier base, to ensure our customers stay ready for what’s ahead. Learn more.

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us

To change your alert settings, please log in at https://www.politico.com/_login?base=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.politico.com/settings