The Western efforts to display cohesion on global challenges collapsed after US President Donald Trump left the G7 summit in the middle and embarrassed other member states by accusing them of not offering a fair trade deal. The widening cracks imply that G7 has effectively regressed into G6 with the future of the alliance entering an uncharted territory.
G7 was originally established to cope with economic challenges but in the 1980s broadened its scope to foreign and security policy issues. In the coming years, this seismic shift aggravated conflicts and hampered peace and prosperity the world over, weighing upon credibility of an alliance whose approach was replete with risks and relevance marred by internal differences.
Beneath G7 downfall, there lies aggrandizement of threats and advancement of self-seeking interests. These narcissistic cravings drove the bloc to impose the US-led international order on the rest of the world, preventing greater involvement of major international players and shunning collaboration on pressing global challenges.
Yet once Trump returned with all his bully and bluster, its member states began to feel the pinch of venturing recklessly with Washington. As a result, they are seeking “independence” from America’s security guarantees, declaring US tariffs as “brutal and unfounded” and recalibrating ties with China to diversify their trade away from the US.
Trump’s view the European Union was formed to “screw” the US is the sequel of his first term when he launched a scathing criticism of the bloc, prodding then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel to rely less on Washington and “take our fate into our own hands.” While factors such as lack of follow-through and Trump's acrimony have the bloc’s unity to test, middle powers’ exclusion has contributed to a sharp decline in G7 international prominence.
The alliance’s waning economic heft is another rationale behind its declining significance. G7 share in global GDP on purchasing power parity, per International Monetary Fund, is set to contract from 51.8% in 1980 to 28.4% in 2025. With emerging and developing accounting for almost 61% of global economic output, the North can more stifle the rise of the Global South or strip it of its legitimate right of having a greater role in the global governance system.
In order to prevent it from fading into triviality, G7 posed itself as an inclusive organization by inviting leaders of emerging economies such as Brazil, India and South Africa that are part of the China-led BRICS, a multilateral alliance seeking to strengthen economic, political and social cooperation and increase influence of the South.
But G7 is unlikely to catch the South's attention because it for decades has denied accession to the emerging economies and remained narrowly focused on interests of a handful of advanced industrial economies. A literal exclusion of South suggests that the bloc pursues to leverage its economic relationship to achieve its own mercenary goals; its spending cuts, leaving developing countries exposed to poverty, hunger, conflicts and climate disasters, debunk its commitment with the South.
The BRICS is being accused of diminishing the role of West-dominated institutions; its long-term priorities have been to reform and strengthen these very multilateral bodies with the aim of enhancing representation of marginalized countries. The notion of a reimagined G7 to resolve the global governance crisis is doomed from the outset given it will just be an extension of an elite club, constraining the involvement of the South as a bystander. Even proponents of the concept have acknowledged the South would find a little appeal in it as they will still be excluded from the alliance.
The Western double standards are the biggest obstacle to G7 drive of tantalizing the South into its camp. For instance, the US and allies have been framing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a struggle for democracy, supporting its right to defend itself and its sovereignty under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Yet when it came to Gaza and now Iran, the rich nations extended full-throated support to Israel, disregarding the latter’s violations of international law and the UN Charter. This powerful display of the Western hypocrisy – as Trump dismissed his own intelligence community’s assessment that Tehran wasn’t building nuclear weapons – would further alienate the North from the South.
The West’s violent strategy, inflated threat perception and hypocrisy on climate change – as well-heeled countries historically accounted for most of the carbon emissions but shifted the responsibility of the green transition on the South that contributed the least to triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution yet suffered the most – have triggered resentments in the South and would continue to blight the G7 ambition of carving out developing world from China’s influence into its orbit.
For decades, G7’s delusion of grandeur has precluded it from authorizing entry of developing economies to the forum, ensuring it remains an exclusive club of wealthy-only nations. This stubbornly arrogant posture accompanying a marked propensity to spark conflicts has faced a pushback from the South, dishing out a beatdown to the alliance’s significance. The bloc is at a crossroads, ergo: mend its hypocritical approach or risk disappearing into oblivion.
*My article that first appeared in the Express Tribune