This week’s G7 Summit highlights the emergence of a new era where the struggle for power between countries will be waged through economic means.
President Barack Obama was in the Bavarian Alps this week for the annual Group of Seven Leaders’ Summit, complete with the time-honored awkward Group photo, a rite that even the leaders of the free world seem powerless to end (2013’s entry remains the one to beat). Yet for all of its timeworn familiarity, this year’s photo offered hints of something new.
It captured the Group’s first real gathering as a body of seven again, down from eight — or, at least the first that all sides had the benefit of a year to plan (while the Group did meet as seven last year, that meeting came just weeks after the Group’s decision to uninvite Russia for conduct unbecoming of a G8 member, upending the planned agenda and forcing a last-minute change of venue from Sochi to the Hague). As such, this week’s Summit suggested the return of a more familiar form of “global governance” – Trans-atlanticism plus Japan. It was the most concrete admission yet that global governance in the post-Cold War era had bitten off more than it could manage, and was in need of downscaling.
Back among true friends, then, how did the G7 do?