The last time U.S. President Donald Trump attended a Group of Seven (G-7) leaders’ summit in Canada, in 2018, he treated it like a reality TV show. “Trump Blows Up G7 Agenda,” read the headline in Politico. Trump arrived late; called for Russia’s readmission to the group (a nonstarter with the other members); described the host, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as “very dishonest and weak”; and refused at the last minute to endorse the joint statement at the end of the meeting.
This month, as leaders of the advanced industrialized democracies that make up the G-7—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—prepare for their annual summit, Canada is hosting once again. With Trump’s tariff war in full swing and targeting the other countries in attendance, this meeting could be even more contentious than his last visit.
But it doesn’t have to be. The G-7 has the potential to play a meaningful role in global governance: taking on a position the Trump administration does not want for the United States and addressing the problems of burden sharing that appear to lie at the root of many of Trump’s concerns about U.S. global leadership. In previous meetings, G-7 members have made clear their interest in addressing technological advancements, public health, major wars, and other issues beyond the group’s traditional mandate. With many international institutions today paralyzed by geopolitical rivalries, the world needs concerted action now more than ever.
Yet to truly turn the G-7 into a body that can sustain the rules-based order, its members need to bolster their ranks, streamline their procedures, and strengthen the group’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Pulling off this reinvention would position the G-7 for leadership—and could even be the kind of sweeping project that appeals to Trump.
FILLING THE VOID
Global governance is in crisis. Wars in Europe and the Middle East, collusion among autocratic powers, and possible nuclear proliferation in Asia and the Middle East have divided members of the UN Security Council, making the once active body effectively nonfunctional. In the last five years alone, Russia has vetoed 14 draft Security Council resolutions on Gaza, Mali, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, nuclear proliferation, and human rights. China has aided this obstruction in 11 of these cases, voting down five resolutions and abstaining from the votes for six. Yet advances in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology require new standards and norms, and the need for resilient supply chains, pandemic preparedness, and clean development demands that countries work together to solve problems—none of which is possible under the current global system.
Without a functioning UN, it falls on individual countries or institutions to uphold the international order. But under Trump, the United States has abdicated its role as the underwriter of the post–World War II rules-based system. The Trump administration is not interested in promoting due process, accountability, representative governance, open capital flows, or liberal trade policies. Authoritarian governments in China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are working together to undermine, not to support, the institutions and norms of the order. Many middle powers—such as Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—want to use the liberal order when it helps them, but they also want to engage with the authoritarian axis. Countries in the global South, meanwhile, are not powerful enough to lead.
Many institutions are not strong candidates for leadership, either. The G-20 was a stabilizing force during the 2008 global financial crisis, but the size of the grouping and the rivalries among China, Russia, the United States, and others have since hamstrung its ability to take collective action. The World Trade Organization, with over 160 members, cannot find consensus on anything, and it has failed to stop China or the United States from weaponizing trade against each other and the world. The ten-country BRICS bloc—which includes founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as well as five newer members—seeks to diminish international institutions historically dominated by the West.
Smaller groupings have proliferated as countries search for alternative rule-making bodies. In the last decade, these have included the Quad (a diplomatic partnership among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States), AUKUS (a security partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (a U.S.-led economic initiative with 14 members), the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (a 12-country free trade agreement), and trilateral cooperation among Japan, South Korea, and the United States. But none of these groups are currently in a position to set rules that the rest of the world might sign on to.
The body that develops solutions to today’s global problems must be composed of governments that trust each other, share similar values, possess significant economic and political power, and have a track record of working together. This is where the G-7 comes in. As a group of like-minded advanced industrialized democracies, it is the only institution that can meet this mandate. The United States has always been an important player in the G-7, but the group’s other members will have to become more fully capable of sharing the burden of leadership in a new era of “America first” policies by Washington. Before they can play this role, however, the G-7 must be overhauled.
NOT YOUR FATHER’S G-7
The origins of the G-7 lie in the global oil crisis of the early 1970s. In 1973, finance ministers from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States convened an informal meeting to coordinate monetary policy in response to the economic shock. Italy and Japan joined the group later that year, Canada joined in 1977, and Russia joined in 1998 (but was expelled in 2014, after its invasion of Crimea). Today, the European Union is also represented in the G-7, with a seat each for the European Council and the European Commission.
For most of its history, the G-7 was a club of rich countries that met to coordinate monetary and macroeconomic policies to combat inflation and recession, and to promote free trade. The club would reach agreements such as the 1985 Plaza Accord, in which European economies agreed to allow their currencies to appreciate against the U.S. dollar for macroeconomic balance. But in the past few years, as the COVID-19 pandemic, economic disruption, climate change, and major wars have demanded global attention, the G-7 has expanded its portfolio. The statement released after the 2023 G-7 leaders’ summit in Hiroshima, Japan, for instance, emphasized global governance issues that were not even on the G-7’s radar five years earlier. Members prioritized topics such as the future of the Indo-Pacific, the war in Ukraine, economic resilience, food security, digital competitiveness, climate change, sustainable development, labor, and nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. For example, the Hiroshima summit produced task forces on improving global health infrastructure, combating economic coercion, building robust cyberdefenses, and coordinating the confiscation of frozen Russian assets related to the war in Ukraine. At the 2024 G-7 summit in Italy, the leaders agreed to provide $50 billion in funds for Ukraine using interest from the frozen Russian assets.
But the G-7 faces a dilemma: it wants to play a larger role in global governance but is not currently well equipped for the part. From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, the G-7 represented as much as 67 percent of world GDP. Today, that number is now barely over 40 percent, and less than ten percent of the global population resides in G-7 countries. The group does not, and should not, harbor expectations that it could replace the UN Security Council and create mandates for all the world to comply with, as the Security Council is set up to do. But the G-7 can aim for meaningful action that sustains global order. By coordinating their economic, development, security, energy, and technology policies, its members can impose sanctions to deter conflict, set rules and norms to keep pace with technological innovation, punish predatory economic behavior, support democratic governance, combat disinformation, and help the developing world with food security and labor standards.
WELCOME TO THE CLUB
The G-7 must embrace reform to meet the moment. The world needs effective governance institutions, and to serve that purpose the G-7 needs to broaden its scope, enhance its capabilities, and add new voices to its deliberations. The first place to start is membership. Expanding the G-7 is not without controversy. Many of the group’s representatives value its exclusiveness and worry that adding new members could make it as unwieldy as the G-20. But if the G-7 is to take on additional responsibilities, it will need additional partners with commensurate capabilities to share the work. The body today is also geographically imbalanced. European countries or institutions hold six of its nine seats. Just one country, Japan, represents the whole of Asia, and no member represents the developing world.
Australia and South Korea should be at the front of the line to join the G-7. G-7 representatives opine that any new members must be responsible stewards of the international economy, be capable of and committed to assuming this role, and, importantly, have the trust of the other G-7 members. Canberra and Seoul clearly meet this standard. Australia has a per capita GDP larger than all G-7 states except the United States; among democracies it has the 12th largest economy in the world. South Korea is a technological and cultural powerhouse and has the largest economy among non-G-7 industrialized democracies except for India and Brazil. Australia has fought on the side of democracy and a rules-based order in every major war since World War I; South Korea has done so since the Korean War.
Both countries have also taken leading roles already in addressing issues that preoccupy the G-7. Australia has shone as an example of a country standing up to economic coercion by China. In 2020, Canberra demanded an international investigation into the origins of the COVID virus and, over more than two years, withstood massive Chinese retaliatory tariffs against Australian beef, barley, and wine by diversifying its export markets away from China. Australia is also a key supplier of critical minerals to other industrialized democracies. South Korea is a major provider of economic and indirect military assistance to Ukraine, and it is a critical player, along with the United States and Japan, in protecting the lead in critical emerging semiconductor chip technology in the West’s competition with China. Over the past few years, moreover, both countries have convened international summits on global health, anticorruption efforts, artificial intelligence, and a host of other pressing issues, demonstrating their commitment to providing public goods for the international system.
Australia and South Korea even outperform some current G-7 members in critical areas identified by G-7 leaders. In a 2024 study for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Cha and Hamre analyzed more than 300 publicly available measures of country performance for all G-7 members as well as Korea and Australia, using data from 2023. We focused on performance across seven issues that the G-7 has identified as priorities: climate change; digital competitiveness; economic resilience and supply chain security; food security; global economy finance, and sustainable development; labor standards; and support for Ukraine. In each issue area, we used the relevant performance metrics to give each country a numerical rank score. Taking the average of all these issue-specific scores, Australia and South Korea ranked higher than several current G-7 members including France, Italy, and Japan. On digital competitiveness, measured across 160 rankings, South Korea performs better than every G-7 country except the United Kingdom and the United States. On economic resilience and supply chain security, measured across 20 available rankings, Australia ranks above every country except Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In aggregate, South Korea ranks eighth among G-7 members in terms of overall performance, ahead of Italy, and Australia ranks fifth, ahead of France, Japan, and Italy. By contrast, another major democracy, India, ranked below Italy in terms of aggregate performance across all the priority issue areas. Australia’s and South Korea’s capabilities as high performers on the very issues deemed critical to G-7 leadership would bring added value to the group.
The Indo-Pacific region now is the center of gravity in global commerce and, arguably, in global politics. Adding Australia and South Korea to the G-7 could boost the representation of the wider Indo-Pacific, giving the region’s interests a stronger voice than Japan can offer alone. To further balance the G-7’s configuration, the EU’s two seats in the body should also be consolidated into one. If the European G-7 members demand that the open seat go to another European country—several of which perform respectably in the G-7’s priority areas—Spain could be a good candidate. According to the 2024 CSIS study, Spain ranked higher than the lowest-ranked G-7 member, Italy, on four out of the seven priority issue areas—and performed better on climate change issues (33 metrics) than all G-7 countries except Germany and the United Kingdom. As a member, Spain could expand the G-7’s reach by providing Spanish-speaking representation, which has been absent from the group. By extension, Spain’s membership could provide a bridge between the G-7 and Latin America.
IT AIN’T BROKE, BUT FIX IT
Institutional reform could also make the G-7 more effective. At present, the agenda for each summit is set by the host country in an informal process. This makes the group flexible, open to frank discussions, and able to act quickly, but the downside is that G-7 efforts lack consistency. At the close of the 2023 Hiroshima summit, for example, G-7 leaders laid out an ambitious agenda to establish a G-7 Coordination Platform on Economic Coercion by authoritarian regimes, as well as guiding principles on the development of advanced AI systems. Then, at the next meeting, in 2024, the host, Italy, chose to focus on migration from North Africa. Next week’s G-7 summit in Canada focuses on energy security and accelerating the digital transition. All these issues are important. But the discontinuity in the G-7’s agenda sends confusing signals to the rest of the world and results in the body not following through on its announced commitments.
To solve this problem, the structure of the G-7 must be reformed. In particular, a consultative body, or troika, composed of representatives from the past, current, and next year’s G-7 hosts should set G-7 meeting agendas, replacing today’s informal system. The current host would invite the previous host and the successor host together to plan out the year’s conferences. Planning annual conferences in this way would give the meetings more continuity from year to year.
In addition, establishing a permanent secretariat would provide the G-7 with an administrative home, regular staff support for the troika and the related task forces, and an archive for G-7 deliverables. The politics of who should host this office are probably least complicated by locating it in Canada. Formal task forces could track member countries’ commitments to G-7 goals and ensure that progress continues between summits. In the G-7 structure, host countries provide most of the technical support for the group’s initiatives, but the temporary nature of the support contributes to continuity problems. The G-7 instead needs to be supported by ongoing and permanent technical expertise on priority issues such as climate change, AI, and global health. This expertise could be provided through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which could lend data and networks of experts from its AI Policy Observatory, its climate adaptation and resilience policy shop, and its health statistics group.
Emerging and middle powers and countries in the global South must also be more involved in a reimagined G-7. The list should include multilateral organizations, such as the African Union, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the G-20, as well as prominent countries outside the G-7, particularly China. Before the leaders’ summits, the troika countries would host formalized consultation channels with these organizations and countries through the foreign and finance ministers’ tracks to discuss the agenda and expected deliverables. After the summit, the consultation channels would link up with the same organizations and countries to discuss implementation and task forces. Institutionalizing outreach to developing economies in this way could demonstrate the G-7’s commitment to inclusivity and confer more legitimacy on its decisions. In the near term, the G-7 could engage outside countries on issues of proximate concern by supporting their economic development and climate goals, fostering new norms and standards for AI and other emerging technologies, and shaping their opposition to disruption to the global order by China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?
For years, G-7 members have resisted the impetus for reform. That resistance was tolerated because global governance institutions were functioning, the United States helped underwrite world order, and there was general stability in the international system. When the leaders meet in Canada, they need to recognize that none of these conditions hold today, and that a new, reimagined G-7 needs to step up to fill the void. There is even a chance that Trump could get on board with G-7 reform, despite his general disdain for international institutions. Trump is drawn to any big policy for which he can take credit, and transforming the G-7 from a sluggish group into one that is action-oriented could qualify. According to Trump’s former representatives at the G-7, expanding and reforming the body could appeal to the president’s interest in getting U.S. allies to contribute more to the costs of global leadership and relieving the United States of the burden. Adding new members such as Australia, South Korea, and Spain could also deflect Trump’s call, which he repeated as recently as February, for the group to readmit Russia, an idea that the rest of the G-7 countries reject. Trump might also like to see the organization’s European dominance diluted by new players from the Indo-Pacific, particularly Australia and South Korea, who would owe their membership to him.
Trump’s “America first” inclinations are a part of the reason for the disarray in the world today, as the United States’ disenchantment with leadership creates a void in global governance. If that void is left unfilled, other actors or institutions may seek to impose less desirable and even dangerous forms of rule. It would be far better for the G-7 to serve as the champion of a rules-based system that the world so urgently needs.