Inside Out | G7 priorities on Ukraine war and China will face pushback from Global South
- G7 efforts to set the international agenda for how to resolve the Ukraine crisis will be complicated by voices from South Africa to Brazil
- Meanwhile, US criticism of China’s ‘economic coercion’ rings hollow given that this behaviour is hardly unique to Beijing. Diplomats call it ‘economic statecraft’
For US President Joe Biden, the exclusive G7 grouping – comprising Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – has assumed critical importance, despite its awkward “rich country” credentials; it is what one European diplomat has called “the workhorse of Western cooperation”, whose shared concern is to defend the “free and open international order”.
These G7 agenda priorities – and the less noticed Jeddah and Xian meetings – provide a glimpse into the economic and strategic fragmentation that is developing as an increasingly multipolar world begins to supplant the unipolar hegemony that has since the creation of the post-war Bretton Woods institutions enabled the United States to set the rules for international political and economic relations.
First, Ukraine. The crisis created by Russia’s inexcusable invasion of Ukraine has evolved as a proxy for this fragmentation. While there is agreement on the tragic consequences for Ukraine and its people, and on the urgent need for an end to the conflict, there has been pushback against the Western narrative of an evil Russian President Vladimir Putin who must at all costs be defeated.