Later this month, the G7 heads of state and government meet in Biarritz in France to discuss the fight against global inequality.
This is no routine summit. Only a small and committed core of nations is capable of addressing the forces threatening the world order. Prosperity has increased dramatically in recent decades, but not for all, while global institutions leave much to be desired. The UN General Assembly, with its 193 members, has slowly sunk into irrelevance, while the G20, the G7’s larger cousin, has not delivered real change. Indeed, how could a body that includes authoritarian strongman leaders such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, China’s Xi Jinping and Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (which will host next year’s summit) possibly do so?
This is a time for hard decisions, not wishful thinking. And realistically, the G7 is the only forum in which to take them. All its members are solid democracies with comparable levels of education and prosperity. The governments of the seven may strongly disagree on a number of issues, but all were fairly elected in countries with constitutional checks and balances.