International summits come and go, amid flurries of staged photos and unread communiqués. But the G7 meeting in Cornwall later this week could be a rare such event that actually matters — for the individual countries involved, for the western alliance and for the wider world.
For Boris Johnson, who is hosting the meeting, it is a chance to counteract any lingering impression that he is a cynical lightweight, and to demonstrate that he can steer a major international meeting. The UK prime minister also needs to show that “Global Britain” is more than a slogan.
For Joe Biden, on his first trip overseas as US president, it is an opportunity to demonstrate that America is back. Biden has made it clear that he intends to rally the world’s democracies in pushing back against Russia and China.
The US president will have a bilateral meeting with Johnson, followed by three summit meetings with democratic allies — first the G7, then Nato, then an EU-US summit — before proceeding on to a meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva. He aims to carry a unified message from America and its democratic allies into that encounter with the Russian president.
The G7 summit will also send an indirect message to China. The propaganda line pumped out from Beijing is that the west is in inexorable decline. A successful G7 summit could reinvigorate the idea that the west can provide global leadership in alliance with fellow democracies in Asia and around the world.
It is the G7’s identity as a club of democracies that gives it renewed significance in an era of rising tension between China and the west. The core seven countries — the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada — first met in the 1970s. At the end of the cold war, Russia was invited to join the group, turning the club into the G8. But the Russian Federation was booted out again after its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The great challenge to the relevance of the G7 is the declining share of the world economy represented by those seven core nations. As Renata Dwan of Chatham House, a UK think-tank, points out, in the 1970s the G7 nations accounted for some 80 per cent of world gross domestic product. That is now down to about 40 per cent.
When the global financial crisis struck the world in 2008, a larger group of countries than the G7 was needed to steer the world economy off the rocks. To deal with that emergency, the Bush administration convened the first ever G20 summit — which included the original G7, plus rising economic powers such as Brazil, India and, above all, China.
The success of the G20 in organising international action to avert a global depression seemed to confirm that the G7’s moment had passed. There was even speculation that the group might never meet again. As US president, Donald Trump derided the group as outdated. It is the Biden administration’s renewed determination to push back against Moscow and Beijing that has provided the G7 with a renewed reason to exist.
But the fact that the G7 no longer represents most of the global economy — and is skewed towards the Euro-Atlantic region — remains a problem.
To compensate, the group have invited four guests to the summit: Australia, India, South Africa and South Korea. The fact that three of these guests are Asian countries underlines the group’s role in pushing back against Beijing.
Nonetheless, several of the core issues placed on the G7 summit agenda — the pandemic, climate and trade — ultimately require Chinese co-operation. They are global issues that cannot be fixed without the participation of the world’s most populous nation and second-largest economy.
The G7’s approach to this dilemma seems to be to try to provide a practical and moral lead that creates momentum for a global agreement. A headline-grabbing example is the deal already reached on a global minimum corporate tax rate, which should be signed off at this week’s G7 meeting and then taken to the G20 summit later this year.
The key question in Cornwall will be whether the G7 can find other practical initiatives that go beyond feel-good slogans about vaccinating the world, net-zero emissions and “free and fair trade”.
On Covid-19, an obvious step would be to sharply increase funding for Covax, the global vaccination programme. The US and the UK will also be under pressure to start donating more vaccines to the developing world, before they have achieved near-complete vaccination at home. In domestic political terms, that could be difficult. But if the G7 dodges the challenge, China is well placed to become the engine of the global vaccination drive.
Since China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, it would be futile for the G7 to go it alone on climate. But the group could advance the global agenda ahead of the COP26 summit in November by agreeing on some eye-catching joint initiatives — ending subsidies for the coal industry, for example.
A global pandemic provides a hugely challenging backdrop for the G7 summit. But a world crisis also provides a unique chance to show leadership. The G7 should take the opportunity — it may not come again.
gideon.rachman@ft.com
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Source: Economy - ft.com
