Patrick Lawrence: ‘Falling Gently Away’: The G–7 in Italy
That Group of 7 gathering on the coast of the Adriatic June 13–15 was truly a doozy, I have to say. Readers might think it a waste of column inches to devote any linage to it, as many will surely have forgotten about it by now—not to mention those many others who did not know of it in the first place and so could not get as far as forgetting it. But this just is my point: The seven people claiming to be the world’s most powerful assemble for a summit and it is not worth our attention? Say whaaa?
The significance of this year’s G–7, I mean to say, lies in its insignificance. Considering the mess these very folk have made of the world, this bears consideration.
Giorgia Meloni seems to have given some thought to the “non–” aspect of the event she hosted at the Borgo Egnazia, a resort hotel in the town of Savelletri di Fasano, “where the hills of the Itria Valley fall gently away to the Adriatic Sea.” Prominent among the diversions the Italian premier arranged was a squad of hang-gliders who descended on the group, each trailing the flag of a G–7 member. Is this gravitas or what, 21st century statecraft at its most elevated—especially with a genocide, as supported by every one of these people, proceeding exactly 1,147 miles across the Mediterranean?
The lasting image of the G–7 2024 summit has to be that viral video of President Biden wandering away from the others with, per usual at this point, the demeanor of a sleepwalker (which seems to me about right). No! the Democratic machine and its clerks in the media protested. That video was unfairly cut. Biden wasn’t drifting into nowhere: He went to talk to one of the hang-gliders as he, the hang-glider, packed up his harness and airframe.
That changes everything. Conversing with a hang-glider rather than the French president, the German chancellor, or the British prime minister is just what “the leader of the free world” should get up to at a G–7 summit. It was, of course, more worthwhile than talking to Justin Trudeau, I will give Biden this.
One of the oddities of this year’s G–7, remarked upon here and there in the media coverage, is the low standing the seven had among their electorates. Axios had a wonderful headline on this, “World losers gather at G–7 summit.” Meloni was the enviable star, with a 40 percent approval rate, but Meloni was the odd one out: She has populist tendencies in a group of neoliberal authoritarians. Biden was second, with 37 percent, but this puts him behind Donald Trump in the American polls.
The rest we can count among the walking wounded: Trudeau arrived at Savelletri with a 30 percent approval rate, Olaf Scholz with 25 percent, and then the hanging-by-fingernails group: Rishi Sunak (25 percent, about to be turned out of office), Emmanuel Macron (21 percent, tipped to lose in snap elections), Fumio Kishida (13 percent).
These people are by dint of the offices they hold the leaders of “the West.” If many of us have worried for some time that no one seems to be driving the bus, maybe we can take cold comfort now in the thought that not many seem to be on it.
Can what remains of the West now fit into an Italian resort? I pose this as a serious question. Those ever-courteous but mercilessly direct Chinese went straight at this in their official comment on the summit. “The G–7 does not represent the world,” Lin Jian, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, remarked after the group issued its communiqué. Lin referred to the G–7’s share of global gross domestic product: It is now roughly 10 percent and declining as the non–West’s rises. But, viewed from the Atlantic world’s perspective, it is just as significant, I would say, that those purporting to lead the West enjoy a similarly declining share of their population’s support.
The New York Times had an entertainingly contorted take on all this. Shared political weakness, along with high anxiety as the West’s major investments go bad—the proxy war in Ukraine, the Israelis’ savagery in Gaza, the attempt to isolate Russia—combined to make this year’s summit “unexpectedly smooth,” as Steve Erlanger wrote from Savelletri—“another example of unchallenged American leadership of the West.” Leave it to The Times, ever ready to find roses in the desert if it makes the imperium seem a good and welcome thing.
Various things got done at the Borgo Egnazia, these almost exclusively to do with China and Ukraine. The People’s Republic now gets marked down as an adversary of the West roughly equivalent in malignancy to Russia. “This year, China and Russia were frequently discussed in the same breath, and in the same menacing terms,” David Sanger wrote in a June 15 analytic piece, “perhaps the natural outcome of their deepening partnership.”
In my surmise, the Biden regime forced this new animosity on the Europeans—it has been at this for many months, indeed—and we will have to see whether it is of much consequence beyond language in a communiqué. But, setting the Europeans aside, it appears to mark a decisive shift in American policy. Gone may be the days when Biden’s foreign policy inepts wanted some impossible combination of cooperation, competition, and confrontation in Washington’s relations with Beijing.
We may have just watched as the last of these wins out. China’s very testy response to the communiqué strongly suggests this. “The G–7 is no longer on the right path of win-win cooperation,” Lin Jian, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in his statement. “Win-win” is a phrase Beijing has long used to characterize what it has seen as the potential for mutual benefit in Sino–U.S. relations.
As to Ukraine, the G–7 signed on to a $50 billion “loan”—I have heard of no one who expects repayment—that will come primarily from the U.S. and be repaid by drawdowns on the interest accruing to Russians’ financial assets in the U.S. and Europe, estimated at $300 billion or so. Washington and Tokyo, ever-pliant in these kinds of cases, signed long-term security accords with the Kiev regime. Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, described this as part of a “bridge to membership” among the G–7 powers that will, when Ukraine crosses it, lead to acceptance in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
I see little new in this, honestly, and some inflating of the already-accomplished to make G–7 2024 look productive. Washington’s 10–year security pact simply puts on paper what has long been the Biden regime’s commitment—weapons, weapons, and more weapons—and Tokyo’ signature on a security agreement with Kiev I shall let speak for itself. The $50 billion “injection,” as The Times calls it to avoid the nonsense of “loan,” is simply more bad money after bad, but there are a couple of things to say about this.
One, to intervene in Russia’s overseas accounts in this fashion is a flagrant breach of international law, which is why the Europeans have heretofore been highly reluctant to participate in this scheme. It is another of Treasury Secretary Yellen’s malign masterpieces, and there is a good chance this recklessness will bite the G–7’s central banks, first among them the Federal Reserve, hard on their backsides in years to come.
Two, we had better step back and count the beans as an additional $50 billion goes to the crooks in Kiev. With the U.S. well in the lead, the G–7’s transfers to Ukraine since the Russian military intervention two years ago are well on the way to $200 billion. Ukraine’s GDP in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available—are last year’s too embarrassing?—was $160 billion. And that is nominal. Adjusted for inflation, which is customarily the figure economists and policy people take seriously, Ukraine’s GDP as last reported was $95 billion.
Translation: The West has dumped something close to twice Ukraine’s economy into the nation over the past two years. Translation of the translation: This cannot be counted a serious, freestanding nation. It is a dependency that cannot survive on its own. (That makes two on the West’s books: Israel is in the same circumstance.)
Meloni did something interesting when she filled out her guest list. She included on it a number of prominent non–Western leaders: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Indian PM, and three presidents: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates’ Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. They do not appear to have done much other than spectate, and none of the G–7 heads of state seem to have taken much interest in them, but Meloni’s gesture, which is what I count it, is interesting as a measure of the non–West’s rising importance as a global force. The world turns.
Of Gaza the Western leaders had little to say other than a limp-wristed expression of concern. This, a negative presence, a presence by way of an absence, did not go down well in non–Western circles, and certainly not among Middle Eastern nations. The world turns and the world watches.
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s chief political analyst, called the G–7’s statement on Gaza, “absolutely meaningless.” Then he brought some good historical perspective to the question. “Once upon a time, the G–7 used to stand for the Seven Great, the Seven Giants. They are the democratic powers in the world—the rich democracies,” Bishara wrote as the summit concluded. “Now they stand for the Seven Goofy, Grave, even Grotesque Powers when it comes to the question of Gaza.”
That sounds like searing anger where I come from. The larger lesson here: On no question now facing the West, the Gaza assault most pressing among them, can we expect any kind of dynamic response—not now, at no point in the future. Those leading the G–7 simply do not have this in them. To them it is all about what was and what is, no thought to what can be.
I have to wonder why Signora Meloni chose the Borgo Egnazia for this year’s G–7. What went into that selection, given all those grand-beyond-grand hotels along the Lago Maggiore and other such places in the north? In its promotional lit, the Borgo Egnazia boasts of the grounds and how “little stone pathways transport you into the past.” Maybe this was it.
