The news coverage of last weekend’s annual G-7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, highlighted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s attendance of the gathering. The images of Zelenskyy standing next to and being embraced by the leaders of the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., Canada and Italy did make for striking symbolism. But Zelenskyy’s visit was far from the gathering’s key outcome.
More notable is that this year’s G-7 summit was substantively meaningful. This might come as a surprise, as such meetings can often be long on words but short on substance.
To be sure, the joint communiqué released at the end of the summit contained a fair share of boilerplate verbiage, describing the key Western industrialized nations that make up the group as “more united than ever” to meet “global challenges” and “set the course for a better future.” But one should not be so quick to dismiss the communiqué or the other statements issued during the summit, which were notable in making evident exactly why the G-7 nations are more united now than ever before: They view China and Russia as threats to the existing Western-led international order.
More importantly, the summit offered insights into how the Western powers plan to counter the threats posed by these two revisionist powers. It seems the G-7 approach has three facets: ignore Russian intimidation, economically decouple from China and court nations throughout the Global South. It is worth unpacking each of these.
First, the G-7 leaders made it clear that they will not be intimidated by Russian blustering. The communiqué stated that they would “support Ukraine for as long as it takes in the face of Russia’s illegal war of aggression” and that a key goal of the economic sanctions against Russia is to “starve the Russian war machine.” This was coupled with Zelenskyy’s visit as well as the issuance of the “G7 Leaders Statement on Ukraine,” which outlined the various military, economic and diplomatic measures the Western powers will take to “ensure that Russia’s illegal aggression against the sovereign state of Ukraine fails.”
But this approach carries downsides and risks. Supporting Ukraine for “as long as it takes” makes it all the more likely that the war will not end anytime soon, meaning more death and destruction. The G-7 leaders’ statement also notes Russia’s “irresponsible nuclear rhetoric” and actions that increase the chance of nuclear weapons use, including Moscow’s plan to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus. Any actions by the Western leaders to prolong the war therefore also carry the risk of Russia eventually making good on those threats.
The extent to which the G-7 nations follow through on their stated support for Ukraine should become evident quite soon. Six of the group’s seven members are also members of NATO, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has recently spoken of Ukraine eventually joining the alliance, something Russia has firmly opposed. Next month’s NATO summit in Vilnius could therefore be a moment of truth for whether the alliance plans to officially offer Ukraine an accession path. While that decision should be debated on the merits, it was evident that the G-7 summit did much to pave the way toward such a debate.
Second, the G-7 leaders plan to economically decouple from China. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak summed up the group’s general perspective well when he called Beijing “the greatest challenge of our age.” The G-7 leaders noted a host of ways in which China’s actions are undermining regional security, ranging from using force to “change the status quo” in the East and South China Seas, raising tensions in the Taiwan Strait, not pressuring Russia to stop its aggression against Ukraine and “accelerating the build-up of its nuclear arsenal.”
In the perceived need to counter China and Russia, the G-7 powers have a plan for putting their unity into action.
But the primary concern appears to be economic, namely that Beijing is leveraging other states’ dependencies on Chinese trade and investment to exercise “economic coercion.” To maintain “economic resiliency” in the face of such coercion, the G-7 leaders will take measures individually and collectively to invest in their countries’ “economic vibrancy.” This includes reducing what they termed “excessive dependencies” on China in their “critical supply chains.” The communiqué tried to draw a fine distinction between “decoupling” and “de-risking,” claiming that the group’s goal is the latter and not the former. But to Beijing’s ears, that is likely a distinction without a difference.
Third, the G-7 plans to court countries in the Global South, listing support for a variety of efforts these nations have championed in order to redress what they have characterized as an inequitable global order. These include ensuring greater representation for African countries in multilateral fora, updating multilateral development banks to meet the Global South’s current needs and accelerating progress on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
But the G-7’s hallmark initiative with respect to nations of the Global South is the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment, or PGII. Launched at last year’s summit, PGII is the G-7’s answer to China’s massive global development project, the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI. This year, the G-7 leaders once again pledged to deliver on the promised $600 billion earmarked for this project. Could this mean that the U.S. and its Western partners are finally “asking the right questions” regarding the Global South? Time will tell, as it still remains to be seen if the G-7 countries will actually follow through on their pledges or if they are simply more words, rather than substance, when it comes to development assistance.
But if there was ever a time for the Western powers to make good on their development pledges, it is now. Though China has made great inroads in economically supporting countries through the Global South, the BRI is in trouble. Many of the countries that took on loans through the initiative are now facing debt crises, though not necessarily because of China’s use of so-called debt-trap diplomacy, a charge that has been debunked. Additionally, China’s own economic slowdown is threatening to reduce the flow of new funds. If the G-7 can make good on its pledges under the PGII, it might help sway some countries in the Global South to abandon their largely neutral stance toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and perhaps further turn global public opinion against China and Russia.
The G-7 has come a long way since its summits of 2018 and 2019, when sharp disagreements between then-U.S. President Donald Trump and the group’s other six leaders led to no leader communiqués being issued and great worries over the future of the Western-led “liberal international order.” In the perceived need to counter China and Russia as threats to that order, the G-7 powers do indeed seem more united than ever. More importantly, they have a plan for putting that unity into action.
Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.