By Stewart M. Patrick, World Politics Review
Pity the U.S. officials in charge of planning this year’s Group of 7 summit. President Donald Trump initially planned to convene the annual summit at his own private golf resort in Miami. When this bit of self-dealing elicited bipartisan blowback, he shifted the site of the meeting, originally scheduled for this week, to Camp David. Then COVID-19 intervened, and the White House announced plans for a virtual summit, only to have Trump propose on May 20 that the leaders would gather in person after all. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel demurred, the peeved president pivoted again. On May 30, without consulting his G-7 partners, Trump abruptly cancelled their meeting and declared the group obsolete.
“I don’t feel that as a G-7 it properly represents what’s going on in the world,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “It’s a very outdated group of countries.” To remedy this situation, he announced that he would invite Australia, India, Russia and South Korea to join the existing members at an inaugural summit of the “Group of 11” in September, or perhaps November.
Leaving aside the zigzags, Trump’s rationale for expanding the G-7 is solid. There is a compelling case for opening the G-7’s doors to South Korea and Australia, both vibrant democracies with sizeable economies—the world’s 12th and 14th largest respectively. India, the world’s largest democracy and second-most populous country, with 1.3 billion people, also merits consideration.
Trump’s proposal to admit Russia, however, would be disastrous. It would bring an authoritarian fox into the democratic henhouse, crippling the group’s symbolic and practical importance as an embodiment of liberal values and a pillar of a rules-based international order.
There is nothing magic about the number 7, of course. Today’s G-7 got its start in 1973 as the “Group of 5,” when the finance ministers of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States met informally in the White House library. In November 1975, the leaders of these same nations, joined by Italy, met at the Chateau de Rambouillet near Paris to discuss economic policy coordination during a global recession. In 1976, the Group of 6 became the Group of 7, with the addition of Canada. The tent expanded again in 1998 when President Bill Clinton, seeking to bolster President Boris Yeltsin, persuaded his G-7 partners to include Russia as a full member of what became the G-8. That decision proved ill-fated once Vladimir Putin assumed the Russian presidency and adopted an increasingly autocratic style of leadership. In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, the other seven members suspended its membership, and the G-7 was reborn as a coalition of advanced market democracies.
Admitting Russia to the G-7 would bring an authoritarian fox into the democratic henhouse, crippling the group’s symbolic and practical importance.
The G-7’s renaissance was unexpected, since the body had been given up for dead during the global financial crisis. In November 2008, as the world courted a second Great Depression, President George W. Bush convened the first ever leaders-level summit of the Group of 20, a previously obscure forum of finance ministers from the world’s most important advanced and emerging economies. The inclusion of nations like China, India, Brazil and Turkey underscored an obvious point: It was no longer possible to manage the world economy in a closed Western boardroom. The G-20 quickly established itself as the world’s premier forum for global economic coordination, and many predicted that the G-8 would wither on the vine.
Those obituaries proved premature. Russia’s ejection in 2014 allowed the G-7 to resume its position as the leading consultative forum for the world’s most advanced democracies, an informal setting where leaders might discuss and coordinate positions on a range of diplomatic, economic and transnational challenges, including how to confront geopolitical and ideological adversaries like China and Russia. Meanwhile, the more encompassing G-20, a heterogeneous body of unwieldy size, struggled to make the transition from a crisis committee to a more enduring global economic steering group.
To its credit, the Obama administration recognized that the United States did not need to choose between these two frameworks. Rather than placing all of its eggs in a single multilateral basket, America would do best by embracing “multi-multilateralism,” selecting the format best suited to the issue at hand. The G-20 allowed the United States to engage the world’s emerging as well as established powers on pressing macroeconomic priorities, whereas the cozier G-7 helped it craft common Western approaches based on shared geopolitical interests and political and economic values. Nor was that all. Beyond these two groupings, the United Nations offered the benefits of a universal membership organization and the international legitimacy of a binding legal charter. Finally, as needed, the United States could always create flexible, ad hoc arrangements—like the biennial Nuclear Security Summits—to address specific challenges.
Such strategic sophistication appears lost on Donald Trump, who has exhibited special animus toward the G-7. Rather than nurture this coalition of (once) like-minded Western nations, he has taken a wrecking ball to it, most egregiously at the 2018 Charlevoix summit in Canada. More recently, a G-7 foreign ministers meeting this March dissolved into acrimony when Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, insisted that the final communiqué refer explicitly to the “Wuhan coronavirus,” a demand U.S. partners rejected. Trump’s proposal to readmit Russia to an enlarged G-7 would drive a stake through the forum. America’s G-7 partners must deny him that pleasure, while hoping that the next U.S. president returns to the Western fold.
Whereas Russia has no business in an expanded G-7, the notion of a Group of 10 that excludes it could still make sense. Australia and South Korea are not only staunch U.S. allies but vigorous market democracies. They would give an enlarged G-7 a greater Asia-Pacific dimension at a time when an assertive China is challenging the rules-based international order in the region. The case for including India as the 10th member is shakier, for a combination of economic, political and ideological reasons. First, India remains a developing country with a highly protected economy, making it an uneasy fit in a club of wealthy market economies. Second, its political trajectory is worrisome, as the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of prime minister Narendra Modi continues to undermine the secular basis of India’s democracy. Third, Indian membership could dilute the group’s solidarity, given India’s continued membership in the Non-Aligned Movement, the Group of 77—a U.N. bloc of 135 developing countries—and the BRICS coalition.
A safer alternative would be to include the European Union, which has attended G-7 and G-8 summits for decades as an informal member. According the EU full membership would underscore the democratic identity of a new G-10, giving greater voice to the 24 European democracies that remain outside the G-7. What’s more, the expanded club would have the same membership as the “Democratic 10,” an idea promoted by the Atlantic Council think tank, which envisions this democratic bloc as a core pillar of any rules-based order. Trump, of course, cares little about democracy or the rule of law. But there may yet be a way salvage something worthwhile from his otherwise misguided proposal.
Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World” (Brookings Press: 2018). His weekly WPR column appears every Monday.
