In June, leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) countries, including President Joseph R. Biden Jr., adopted the goals of a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent and reallocation of a fifth of profits above a 10 percent threshold (called Amount A in the OECD’s blueprint) earned by large MNCs to the country where goods and services are sold, rather than the country where they are produced.

While the bulk of cross-border economic activity is subject to binding multilateral treaties enforced by international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), there is no “world tax organization.” No attempt has ever been made to establish one. Therein lies a major problem in forging an agreement involving international organizations like the WTO and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

History teaches that governments are jealous of their taxing powers. Within the United States, for example, state governments reject any suggestions that they should harmonize local tax bases or rates. Within the EU, national legislatures write the tax laws, and a common approach is limited to value added taxes (VATs), easing the movement of goods across borders. Given this experience, international institutions must tread lightly.

The OECD has been working since 2013 to develop the two proposals on global tax alignment. But OECD membership numbers only 38 countries, predominantly well-off nations, of which at least three (Estonia, Hungary, and Ireland) do not yet support the proposals. Going forward, international institutions with broader membership—like the IMF and the World Bank—seem better placed to advance international tax proposals.

The IMF has good expertise to illuminate important aspects of both proposals. The place to start is with the proposed 15 percent global minimum. Light can be shed on G7 tax practices that erode headline corporate tax rates below the 15 percent target. For example, the US Congress is now debating a 25 percent refundable tax credit for semiconductor investments. If enacted, this measure will likely reduce the effective tax rate below 15 percent for key firms. More troubling is the existence of multiple “passthrough” entities in the US tax code, such as Subchapter S corporations and limited liability companies (LLCs). These firms pay no corporate tax, yet account for about half of US business revenue. Whether their lighter tax burdens would run afoul of an international tax agreement is an open question at this stage.

Similar practices flourish in the tax codes of France, Italy, Germany, Japan, and the UK. Moreover, the UK is seeking to exclude financial firms from the G7 tax-sharing proposal, thereby protecting a key industry in the City of London. If the IMF shines light on such practices, that may prompt some G7 countries to clarify and reach agreement on their declared minimum.

Of course, when the G7 countries—including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US—declared a 15 percent global minimum, they were mainly not thinking about their own tax credits, exemptions, or subsidies. Their aim was to change the policies of the 35 low-tax jurisdictions, predominantly tiny economies, listed here. Together, these jurisdictions have about 100 million citizens, a third of them in Uzbekistan. Several of these countries enacted low headline corporate rates to attract foreign direct investment from MNCs and a slice of global value chains, thereby creating high-wage local jobs. For these countries, implementing the 15 percent minimum rate may reverse the process and cost local jobs, as well as local personal tax and VAT revenues. The IMF could assess those outcomes, particularly for medium-sized countries like Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ireland.

Moreover, the US Treasury has proposed a “top-up” tax that would deprive US MNCs of tax benefits of locating activity in low-tax jurisdictions. If enacted, top-up taxes could have significant adverse effects on low-tax economies. Besides assessing such possibilities, the IMF could suggest alternative development and fiscal approaches for affected countries.

Turning to the reallocation proposal, if headquarter countries of the largest MNCs—essentially the G7 countries—will submit the tax and accounting returns of these firms to the IMF, then the Fund could act as the “honest broker” both in determining which MNCs are covered and in allocating some of these tax revenues to the place of sale. Without an honest broker to perform these services, multiple disputes and litigation between MNCs and countries are certain to become even more contentious than they would otherwise become.

Some of the low-tax jurisdictions that lose out from implementing the 15 percent global minimum may gain revenue from the reallocation. This is another area where analysis is needed beyond what the OECD has done to motivate these proposals. The OECD has estimated some aggregate numbers as to how much more tax might be collected from MNCs, but this analysis can be followed by further calculations on which countries would gain and which countries would lose, and how much in each case. However, even if G7 economies accept Amount Ain principle, it may take years for the reallocation to be written into national tax laws.

In the meantime, some low-tax countries may suffer not only from the net loss of tax revenue but also from the loss of MNC jobs. With that possibility in mind, the World Bank, together with the regional development banks, can explore the need for extending budget support to their severely affected members.

Simeon Djankov is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Prior to joining the Institute, Djankov was deputy prime minister and minister of finance of Bulgaria from 2009 to 2013.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer, nonresident senior fellow, was the Peterson Institute for International Economics Reginald Jones Senior Fellow from 1992 to January 2018.

To read the full commentary from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, please click here.

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The news headlines homed in on one aspect of the joint statement that urged China to respect the autonomy and human rights in Hong Kong and the situation in Xinjiang. There was also unprecedented support for stability across the Taiwan Strait – which China immediately denounced as illegal meddling with its internal affairs. President Biden may have failed to rally France and Germany into the jihad against China. But the statement has entrenched the two deeper regardless.

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Known associates of China sometimes like to challenge the “legitimacy” of G7. Other fellow Brussels pundits probably don’t share Beijing’s actual concern about G7, which is that China is not a member. Instead, critics point to the lack of “purpose” of G7 or its lack of efficacy, especially compared to the more technically oriented G20.

The criticism against G7 disregards how the two summits serve very different purposes: G7 of today is effectively a like-minded group that shares a history, yet not all the strategies going forward. In contrast, G20 is a policy coordination mechanism between the principal regional powers, where its members merely share a common aversion against tumbling backwards. And neither G7 nor G20 is very effective at what they do. But are there any viable alternatives? It would be a return to G2, to which Europe and Japan won’t be invited.

Yet, China’s systemic challenge is just one tent peg that grounds the big tent of the alliance. Still, the China peg determines how far the other pegs can stretch the fabric. A tech divide evidently continues to spook the seven countries. At the digital ministers’ meeting in late April, the US and its allies called for a reference on 5G vendor diversity in the summit conclusion but failed. Japan and the US had already pledged $4.5 billion towards developing indigenous alternatives although their home markets were already free from Chinese suppliers. The US Senate also tabled the Endless Frontier Act (later merged into the US Innovation and Competition Act) to promote a consortium of US and Chinese market entrants by displacing European and Korean 5G vendors. These proposals may not meet the non-discriminatory requirements on subsidies and technical standards laid down under the WTO.

Similarly, the US resists EU regulations against US platforms and online services using arbitrary thresholds that single out Silicon Valley. In other words, digital markets divide the G7 between those who want vendor diversity in technologies where Europe happens to be leading, yet not in online platforms where the US happens to be dominant – or vice versa. Instead, the final G7 leaders’ communique reiterates the need for “transparency, the openness of process and participation, relevance, and consensus-based decision-making” in line with referenced WTO agreements. The US-led Open RAN Alliance is unlikely to meet any of these criteria.

But at its best, G7 is a preparatory meeting before a global consensus, similar to how APEC served that role before some WTO ministerials. That is how G7 as a likeminded group (arguably more homogeneous than APEC) exert its influence. For example, the conflict over corporate taxation of services (unfairly epitomised as “digital tax”) approach its end with a compromise of a 15% minimum tax floor and a split of the tax revenues between destination and home jurisdictions. There’s still a great deal of strategic ambiguity left: Some countries might continue their tax deductions on intangibles or decide to go after small businesses. Just imagine a mom-pop shop or a freelance architect paying corporate taxes in every country where their clients reside. Some will surely ignore the G7 consensus outright.

From Cornwall to Brussels

In a time of geopolitical gambits, intense lobbying and renewed interest in industrial policy, there are plenty of temptations and disagreements on both sides of the Atlantic. The truce on the Airbus-Boeing dispute may not herald a new transatlantic era, if it means that every window in the glasshouse has been broken and all legal remedies are exhausted. The only option that now remains is to forgive ourselves our common sins.

Then there is the small matter of ending Section 232 measures on steel, which remains a sacred goal for the German stakeholders. Ending the tariffs is also an exorcising ritual that Merkel needs to love America again. But lifting the 232s remains a political risk for the Biden-Harris administration – at least until it secures its second term. Applying pressure through EU tariff retaliation against the swing states (merely helping the Republicans) or carbon tariffs are arguably just self-harming.

The truth is that Europe and America continue to be antagonists in their own right. But unlike Beijing, Brussels wields a formidable soft power that legitimises tech policies in other countries that are hostile to US industrial interests, while the US has billions of Federal funds for industrial policies its disposal. Just like the Airbus-Boeing conflict – services tax, platform regulations, or illegal 5G subsidies are transatlantic issues we bring to the OECD, WTO, G7 or G20 for collateral damage. A cynic might say that the EU and the US should spare the rest of the world of their transatlantic champagne problems.

In that regard, the bilateral Trade and Tech Council seems like a natural progression and a deliverable worthy of an EU-US summit. But we should not forget that much of the regulatory coordination was already taking place, discretely at technical levels in areas like export control, third-country trade or standardisation. TTC trace its origins with other similar ideas to the final days of the Trump administration. But if the intention is to triangulate against harmful third country practices, one might argue that some partners, some of who hold critical leverages against China, went missing along the way.

Also, institutionalising that bilateral dialogue is not entirely risk-free. Publicity creates an incentive for blame games, where one accuses the other of not “engaging seriously” and melodramatic walk-outs, just because the other side happens to disagree. Like its predecessors – TEC and TTIP – TTC will attract lobbyists, NGOs, and others with no genuine interests in transatlantic mechanisms. Instead, they are merely trying to lobby for new domestic rules through the backdoor.

Hosuk Lee-Makiyama is the director of European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) and a leading author on trade diplomacy, EU-Far East relations and the digital economy.

To read the original commentary from The European Centre for International Political Economy, please visit here

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While the B3W claims to be a highly cohesive initiative, the BRI has expanded beyond comprehension and would be extremely difficult to dethrone, even when some of the most lucrative economies of the world are joining heads to compete over the largely untapped potential of the region. Now let’s be fair and contest that neither the G7 nor China intends the welfare of the region over profiteering. However, China enjoys a headstart. The BRI was unveiled back in 2013 by president Xi Jinping. The initiative was projected as a transcontinental long-term policy and investment program aimed to consolidate infrastructural development and gear economic integration of the developing countries falling along the route of the historic Silk Road. 

The highly sophisticated project is a long-envisioned dream of China’s Communist Party; operating on the premise of dominating the networks between the continents to establish unarguable sovereignty over the regional economic and policy decision-making. Referring to the official outline of the BRI issued by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the BRI drives to: “Promote the connectivity of Asian, European, and African continents and their adjacent seas, establish and strengthen partnerships among the countries along the Belt and Road [Silk Road], set up all-dimensional, multi-tiered and composite connectivity networks and realize diversified, independent, balanced, and sustainable development in these countries”. The excerpt clearly amplifies the thought process and the main agenda of the BRI. On the other hand, the B3W simply stands as a superfluous rival to an already outgrowing program.

Initially known as One Belt One Road (OBOR), the BRI has since expanded in the infrastructural niche of the region, primarily including emerging markets like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The standout feature of the BRI has been the mutually inclusive nature of the projects, that is, the BRI has been commandeering projects in many of the rival countries in the region yet the initiative manages to keep the projects running in parallel without any interference or impediment. With a loose hold on the governance whilst giving a free hand to the political and social realities of each specific country, the BRI program presents a perfect opportunity to jump the bandwagon and obtain funding for development projects without undergoing scrutiny and complications. With such attractive nature of the BRI, the program has significantly grown over the past decade, now hosting 71 countries as partners in the initiative. The BRI currently represents a third of the world’s GDP and approximately two-thirds of the world’s entire population.

Similar to BRI, the B3W aims to congregate cross-national and regional cooperation between the countries involved whilst facilitating the implementation of large-scale projects in the developing world. However, unlike China, the G7 has an array of problems that seem to override the overly optimistic assumption of B3W being the alternate stream to the BRI. 

One major contention in the B3W model is the facile assumption that all 7 democracies have an identical policy with respect to China and would therefore react similarly to China’s policies and actions. While the perspective matches the objective of BRI to promote intergovernmental cooperation, the G7 economies are much more polar than the democracies partnered with China. It is rather simplistic to assume that the US and Japan would have a similar stance towards China’s policies, especially when the US has been in a tense trade war with China recently while Japan enjoyed a healthy economic relation with Xi’s regime. It would be a bold statement to conclude that the US and the UK would be more cohesively adjoined towards the B3W relative to the China-Pakistan cooperation towards the BRI. Even when we disregard the years-long partnership between the Asian duo, the newfound initiative would demand more out of the US than the rest of the countries since each country is aware of the tense relations and the underlying desperation that resulted in the B3W program to shape its way in the Summit.

Moreover, the B3W is timed in an era when Europe has seen its history being botched over the past year. Post-Brexit, Europe is exactly the polar opposite of the unified policy-making glorified in the B3W initiate. The European Union (EU), despite US reservations, recently signed an investment deal with China. A symbolic gesture against the role played by former US President Donald J. Trump to bolster the UK’s exit from the Union. As London tumbles into peril, it would rather join hands with China as opposed to the democrat-regime of the US to prevent isolation in the region. Despite US opposition, Germany – Europe’s largest economy – continues to place China as a key market for its Automobile industry. Such a divided partnership holds no threat to the BRI, especially when the partners are highly dependent on China’s market and couldn’t afford an affront to China’s long envisaged initiative.

Even if we assume a unified plan of action shared between the G7 countries, the B3W would fall short in attracting the key developing countries of the region. The main targets of the initiative would naturally be the most promising economies of Asia, namely India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh. However, the BRI has already encapsulated these countries: China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor (BCIMEC) being two of the core 6 developmental corridors of BRI. 

While both the participatory as well as the targeted democracies would be highly cautious in supporting the B3W over BRI, the newfound initiate lacks the basic tenets of a lasting project let alone standing rival to the likes of BRI. The B3W is aimed to be domestically funded through USAID, EXIM, and other similar programs. However, a project of such complex nature involves investments from diverse funding channels. The BRI, for example, tallies a total volume of roughly USD 4 to 8 trillion. However, the BRI is state-funded and therefore enjoys a variety of funding routes including BRI bond flotation. The B3W, however, simply falls short as up until recently, the large domestic firms and banks in the US have been pushed against by the Biden regime. An accurate example is the recent adjustment of the global corporate tax rate to a minimum of 15% to undercut the power of giants like Google and Amazon. Such strategies would make it impossible for the United States and its G7 counterparts to gain multiple channels of funding compared to the highly leveraged state-backed companies in China.

Furthermore, the B3W’s competitiveness dampens when conditionalities are brought into the picture. On paper, the B3W presents humane conditions including Human Rights preservation, Climate Change, Rule of Law, and Corruption prevention. In reality, however, the targeted countries are riddled with problems in all 4 categories. A straightforward question would be that why would the developing countries, already hard-pressed on funds, invest to improve on the 4 conditions posed by the B3W when they could easily continue to seek benefits from a no-strings-attached funding through BRI?

The B3W, despite being a highly lucrative and prosperous model, is idealistic if presented as a competition to the BRI. Simply because the G7, majorly the United States, elides the ground realities and averts its gaze from the labyrinth of complex relations shared with China. The only good that could be achieved is if the B3W manages to find its own unique identity in the region, separate from BRI in nature and not rivaling the scale of operation. While Biden has remained vocal to assuage the concerns regarding the B3W’s aim to target the trajectory of the BRI, the leaders have remained silent over the detailed operations of the model in the near future. For now, the B3W would await bipartisan approval in the United States as the remaining partners would develop their plan of action. Safe to say, for now, that the B3W won’t hold a candle to the BRI in the long-run but could create problems for the G7 members if it manages to irk China in the Short-run.

Syed Zain Abbas Rizv is an active current affairs writer primarily analyzing the global affairs and their political, economic and social consequences. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree from Institute of Business Administration (IBA) Karachi, Pakistan.

To read the full commentary from Modern Diplomacy, please click here.

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Certainly, the G7 – cancelled last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic – was the most forward looking and productive for many years, at least in terms of the usual avalanche of ambitious statements of intent. This was important because the G7 has come under a lot of criticism in recent times. Many NGOs claim that it takes initiatives that are not implemented, such as the promise back in 2009 to give $100bn to developing countries to help them to adapt to climate change. Others point out that the G20, founded in 2008, is a more legitimate structure as it includes the emerging economies in the world and is therefore a better mechanism to achieve a global impact than the G7. The latter today represents around 40% of global GDP, whereas it was 60% just a decade ago and 80% when it first met in France in 1975. So, the G7 was under pressure to show that it can still be a useful forum to set international priorities and stimulate broader multilateral initiatives. Angela Merkel spoke of “values-based multilateralism”. The implication was that the democracies not only provide human freedom in contrast to the authoritarian states, but can provide security and economic prosperity as well – and even better than their rivals.In this respect, in person meetings matter in terms of facilitating relationships, especially as Biden had met in person only the Japanese and South Korean leaders in the White House prior to the G7. So, he held a number of bilaterals, especially with the UK host, Boris Johnson, with whom he signed a new Atlantic Charter’, an updated version of the one agreed between Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941 when they pledged to promote democratic values and universal human rights, as well as new structures for multinational cooperation after the Second World War. This was an important marker for the British in prolonging their ‘special relationship’ with the US and giving the narrative of ‘Global Britain’ a more secure basis after the UK’s departure from the EU. As there is no US-UK post-Brexit trade agreement in sight, one of the promised deliverables of Brexit, the new ‘Atlantic Charter’ is at least a signal that the UK will remain primus inter pares as a security partner for Washington.If the West is to be a force on the international stage, it needs to better harmonise its financial and economic policies. During the Trump years this type of cooperation proved difficult across the Atlantic, with both the EU and the US engaged in trade disputes over steel, aluminium and aircraft subsidies. There were also hefty disputes over data handling and storage and the taxation of multinational companies, particularly in the technology sector. Here, G7 finance ministers achieved a breakthrough two weeks before the G7 summit when they agreed on a minimum 15% global tax rate and tax adjustments in countries where the tech multinationals do most of their business. The US made the major concessions here but wants the EU countries like France and the UK to abandon their national rules on tax first before the new global regime will enter into force. It is unpopular with Republicans in the US and has to be endorsed by the G20 to be globally effective.

On other trade issues there was disappointment on the European side. The US has kept ‘Buy American’ provisions in its public procurement. The EU and the US have helpfully postponed the implementation of tariffs on steel, aluminium and aircraft, but they have not yet come to a final agreement on removing these tariffs. A new US-EU trade pact is not on the horizon yet. So, much work remains to be done on integrating the G7 economies to boost domestic growth.The G7 was more impressive for its efforts on the international front.The G7 was under a lot of pressure to deliver more solidarity on the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the area of the distribution of vaccines. Biden committed the US to providing 500mn doses of the Pfizer vaccine – 200mn this year and the remainder in 2022. The US has already dispatched 80mn doses from its national stockpile. The UK announced the delivery of 100mn doses over the next year but with no precise timetable. France and Germany each pledged 30mn as part of an overall EU effort totalling 100mn. The G7 leaders made a great deal of these various vaccine pledges and together pledged to distribute 1bn vaccines through COVAX and GAVI by the end of 2022.The sub-text behind this initiative was not only to help the 46 poorest countries that so far have received only 1% of their vaccine requirements, but also to push back against China and Russia and regain the high moral ground. Several G7 leaders lamented that the West has been put on the public relations defensive by China and Russia, which have exploited in the media their own modest contributions to the developing countries and presented the West as selfish and uncaring, despite the slow progress of their own vaccination campaigns at home. Although the G7’s new focus on getting 60% of the world’s population vaccinated by the end of 2022 was welcomed by many, NGOs pointed out that 1bn extra vaccines falls well short of the WHO target of 11bn and was lacking in urgency given that 3.9mn have already died from the virus worldwide. With two jabs required, the vaccine numbers need to be doubled as part of a wartime mobilisation effort.

Also, there were few details about how the G7 countries can work with the developing countries on setting up administrations and systems to actually inject the vaccines into people’s arms quickly. Here, the G7 members have gained useful experience with their national vaccination campaigns which could be passed on. Given that the virus is now surging in Africa, NGOs also criticised the slow pace of the vaccine distribution wanting more action now. One issue that could have been contentious did not really surface: the transatlantic debate over intellectual property and patent waivers where the US has been in favour but Germany opposed because of its impact on the research and development investments of the pharmaceutical sector. Instead, the G7 spoke of boosting domestic vaccine production in Africa and elsewhere, setting up a global alert network to spot virus outbreaks earlier and bringing together more rapidly international experts to analyse and identify virus pathogens. Here again, G20 endorsement will be key if these initiatives are to get off the ground. Where the G7 has more autonomy is in learning the lessons of the current COVID-19 pandemic in order to better prepare for future pandemics, a debate led by the UK. Here the debate covered the well-known territory of resilience, ensuring domestic production of key elements like pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, and the integrity or diversity of critical supply chains.Another aspect of pushing back against increasing Chinese influence in the developing world was the adoption of the Build Back Better World initiative (B3W). This was presented as a direct response to Beijing’s One Belt, One Road programme. The idea is to give those countries attracted by Chinese offers an alternative source of advice and expertise with none of the associated downside, as the G7 would see it, of indebtedness, environmental and social exploitation, and long-term foreign control and influence. This initiative chimes with the current emphasis within the G7 countries to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic by investing in the digital economy and green carbon neutral technologies and infrastructure. Yet it is not clear where the billions of dollars needed to fund such an initiative will come from and how B3W will be organised and managed. Will it be new money or money re-directed from existing funds in the IMF or World Bank? At all events it can build on the International Development Finance Corporation which the US has set up as an alternative to Chinese financing.

Finally, climate change was another agenda item. In the run up to the COP26 in Glasgow this November, the G7 was obviously keen to reiterate the commitment of its members to halve their carbon emissions by 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century. They also pledged to give $100bn in climate finance to the developing countries to help them to adapt their economies and infrastructure. Yet, as said already, this was the renewal of an old commitment rather than coming up with a new financial tranche for the COP26 for the decade ahead.Some tough issues were avoided in areas such as domestic carbon taxes and the EU’s proposal for a carbon border tax on goods coming in from countries with lower standards. This said, there were initiatives to protect biodiversity through establishing special climate reserves in up to 30% of the world’s oceans and land surfaces. Equally, the G7 pledged to stop financing coal production in foreign aid projects and to lobby against fossil fuel subsidies. Climate change was one area, however, where the difficulty of making significant progress without having China at the table was remarked upon in much of the commentary.In sum, China may not have been mentioned in every paragraph of the G7 communique but competing with China and pushing back against growing Chinese global influence were leitmotifs that ran throughout every session discussion topic. The invitation to four non-G7 countries – Australia, South Korea and South Africa – to join the meeting in Cornwall in person, with India linking up by video, testified to the G7’s need to broaden its base and reach out to more major democracies to gain legitimacy and traction for its initiatives with the G20 and beyond. It will be difficult to leave them out on future occasions.Despite some reservations from France, Italy and Germany – who do not want a confrontational approach towards China – and at the urging of Biden, China was addressed directly in the communique, especially on the topic of the treatment of the Uighur community in Xinxiang and of Hong Kong. China was also criticised for its ‘anti-market’ trade policies, mainly dumping at below market prices. This inevitably led China to push back against the G7’s legitimacy in speaking on behalf of the global community and to denounce once again interference in its domestic affairs. The problem in building coalitions of democracies around new causes is that it also drives adversaries into deeper retrenchment, thereby compounding the competition that brings the coalition into existence.

The G7 was long on commitments, not all of which lived up to the hopes of observers, but as in the past, the credibility test will lie behind the press announcements and in the painful bureaucratic work mobilising governments, multilateral institutions and the private sector to come up with the needed resources and detailed delivery programmes. Big summit events like the G7 rely on new initiatives and media deliverables that show politicians leading from the front, but following up on previous commitments is just as important for effectiveness in the long run.The Cornwall G7 was a big effort to return the G7 to its former role as the Directoire of the global political system, the central coordinating axis of the most influential powers around which the global multilateral system turns. Now that Russia has been excluded following its annexation of Crimea in 2014, the short lived G8 has put paid to the idea that the forum could be a badly needed meeting point of the great powers, democratic or otherwise, to build bridges and tackle the global challenges that they still share. For instance, climate change, arms control or regional conflicts.The G7 has reverted to being essentially a club of the West, the embodiment of ‘old power’ at a time when 3.4bn people and 60% of global GDP reside in Asia, and more of the world’s population live in authoritarian than democratic societies. Whether the G7 can make a comeback as the leader of the West, recovering its strength and its mojo to out-compete the authoritarians, and make the 21st century – against all expectations – the age for democratic renaissance will take more than just one upbeat meeting in a sunny Cornwall. But it will be interesting to watch.

Jamie Shea is the Senior Fellow for Peace, Security and Defence at Friends of Europe and former Deputy Assistant Secretary General for emerging security challenges at NATO

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Q1: What prompted this initiative?

A1: The United States and other G7 countries have developed common concerns about China’s ambitious BRI since it was launched by President Xi Jinping in 2013. These include, for example, a lack of transparency around Chinese lending, corruption, unsustainable debt, adverse environmental and social impacts, and projects with dual-use potential. The Biden administration has framed the initiative as a response to BRI, noting in the first line of its fact sheet: “Today President Biden met with G7 leaders to discuss strategic competition with China and commit to concrete actions to help meet the tremendous infrastructure need in low- and middle-income countries.”

Unmet global needs are another primary driver. China’s BRI has significantly pulled back in recent years, underscoring Beijing’s challenges in managing the endeavor and presenting an opportunity for G7 countries to offer competing alternatives. To be sure, China’s BRI was never as big as sometimes portrayed, reaching into the hundreds of billions rather than trillions of dollars. A lack of transparency, and the absence of official criteria for projects, makes it difficult to track the BRI with precision. But the overall trend is clear: as the list of countries participating in the BRI has ballooned, the resources being made available to those countries have plummeted. The Covid-19 pandemic has further increased needs in the developing world while reducing the ability of many countries to borrow.

Although competing alternatives to the BRI are gaining new momentum, they have struggled to deliver tangible projects. As host of the Group of 20 (G20) in 2019, Japan won endorsement by G20 leaders (including Xi Jinping) to a set of principles for quality infrastructure investment. The same year, Japan and the European Union announced a “Partnership on Sustainable Connectivity and Quality Infrastructure.” This January, the European Parliament adopted a resolution that calls for creating a global EU Connectivity Strategy as an extension of the current EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy. Attending this year’s G7 summit as an observer, India announced the Asia Africa Growth Corridor with Japan in 2017 and is discussing a joint initiative with the European Union.

For its part, the United States has gradually realized the importance of offering positive alternatives. In late 2019, United States, Japan, and Australia announced the “ Blue Dot Network” (BDN) to help operationalize the G20 principles. The effort has received encouraging interest from the private sector and civil society, but it is still developing criteria for certifying projects that meet high standards. The B3W could add urgency to announce pilot projects and work toward expanding the BDN to include European partners.

The B3W’s global scope could allow partners to focus on different functional and geographic areas in line with their capabilities and interests. European partners, for example, are increasingly active in the Western Balkans, where Chinese projects have raised red flags in several EU-candidate countries. Japan has been active in Southeast Asia, where it remains the incumbent provider of infrastructure projects. U.S. involvement is likely to emphasize the Indo-Pacific, which will also help respond to criticism that the Biden administration, which has resisted the idea of rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership or other regional trade agreements, lacks a credible economic strategy in the region.

Q2: Why the focus on mobilizing private capital?

A2: Global demands for infrastructure cannot be met by public capital alone. During 2015-19, G7 countries provided nearly $113 billion in official development assistance for foreign infrastructure projects, as illustrated below. That support is fundamentally different from most of China’s BRI lending, which comes with higher interest rates and does not adhere to the Paris Club principles. While remaining steady as China’s BRI has declined, the G7’s combined assistance is only a fraction of what the developing world needs. Developing Asia alone will require $26 trillion in infrastructure investment through 2030, according to the Asian Development Bank.

The private sector is where the untapped financial firepower resides. Pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds are all looking for reliable, long-term returns. Wealth and money managers now handle over $110 trillion, more than 16 times the U.S. federal budget in 2020. But only a small fraction of this vast amount is invested in infrastructure, and developing economies, in particular, have appeared too risky for many investors. According to World Bank data, during 2015-19, private sector investors in G7 countries put roughly $22 billion toward infrastructure projects in developing countries. For example, if G7 countries realized the International Finance Corporation’s mobilization target of 80 percent, current levels of assistance would unlock more than $200 billion over five years.

This will require designing incentives that shift investors’ risk-reward calculus. As the CSIS Global Infrastructure Task Force noted:

The challenge is that too often, especially in emerging markets, potential rewards are not commensurate with perceived risks. The list of overarching risks is long and varied: environmental, social, health, and safety risks; inflation, foreign exchange, and other macroeconomic risks; idiosyncratic decisionmaking, contract disputes, weak rule of law, and other legal and political risks. The complexity of projects should not be discounted, and there is an assortment of construction and operations risks. . . . As a result of all of these challenges, there is a shortage of “bankable” projects that can promise enough upside. Unlocking greater pools of U.S. private capital will require innovative ways, including multilateral or direct insurance products, to adjust the current risk-reward calculus.

Q3: What will the U.S. government need to do to make B3W a viable alternative to the BRI?

A3: The United States and its partners need to invest in a system for developing a sustainable pipeline of bankable projects. Sharing information and improving coordination between public and private sector stakeholders, as the G20’s Global Infrastructure Hub was created to do, is necessary but not sufficient. Preparing projects will require putting some public money on the table. In developing countries, project preparation expenses often approach five to ten percent of the total project cost. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s Project Preparation Facility is one promising model to consider.

The United States should continue to support capacity-building efforts as well. Providing transaction assistance bilaterally and through multilateral institutions can help developing countries avoid unusual confidentiality clauses, inflated costs, and other risks. Modest investments in these activities can have outsized outcomes, which will help countries negotiate for better financial and legal terms that meet accepted international standards. For example, helping more countries implement life-cycle cost assessments will also enhance the competitiveness of the B3W offers.

The B3W needs to resonate with leaders in developing countries. Many will be eager to expand their options, and the B3W brand could carry prestige as a high-quality effort. But leaders will be cautious about tradeoffs that B3W projects might present—more public scrutiny, higher up-front costs, and longer timelines for project delivery. Competing against China’s approach, which often promises speed and low up-front costs, will require fashioning effective incentives.

Finally, the U.S. government needs a central coordinator for these efforts. The list of U.S. agencies with relevant expertise and capabilities is long, including not only State, Treasury, Commerce, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, but also Defense, Homeland Security, Transportation, and smaller specialized agencies, such as the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and the Trade and Development Agency, among others. President Biden’s making the B3W a priority provides an opportunity to more effectively harness these capabilities.

Matthew P. Goodman is senior vice president for economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Jonathan E. Hillman is a senior fellow with the CSIS Economics Program, director of the Reconnecting Asia Project, and author of The Emperor’s New Road.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

© 2021 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.

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Yet this year, there was a long communiqué, and it had a full section even entitled “Free and Fair Trade.” Once more, the G7 committed to championing “the rules-based multilateral system” that the previous US President so disparaged.

The G7 statement now calls “for the world’s leading democratic nations to unite behind a shared vision.” That vision is “to ensure the multilateral trading system is reformed, with a modernised rulebook and a reformed World Trade Organization (WTO) at its centre.”

This general commitment is followed by specific ones. The first stresses the need to make “progress” for the WTO’s next Ministerial Conference in November, with the hope of “a meaningful conclusion” of negotiations on fisheries subsidies. Meanwhile, subsidized fleets deplete the oceans of fish. The baseline for progress may be low, but engagement is critical.

The second expresses concern about “forced labour in global supply chains.” The statement does not call out China by name, possibly because of pushback from other G7 members, but it specifically mentions “the agricultural, solar, and garment sectors,” all of which involve production in Xinjiang.

The final paragraph commits to working together and “with the wider WTO membership” to address major issues that implicate China. Once more, China is not mentioned expressly, but the US clearly has China in its scope on “forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, lowering of labour and environmental standards to gain competitive advantage, market-distorting actions of state owned enterprises, and harmful industrial subsidies,” and “transparency.” As I have argued elsewhere, singling out China by a so-called “alliance of democracies” is not just risky, but a mistake. The issues, however, are real.

Perhaps most interesting is the G7’s commitment to advance the “proper functioning of the WTO’s negotiating function and dispute settlement system” (emphasis added). This could have been worded more elegantly (“functioning” of a “function”?), but it is an advance.

Unstated is that there is tension—if not outright contradiction—between the G7 commitment to a “rules-based multilateral system” and the US neutering of WTO dispute settlement. Here the US remains alone among the G7 and the “broader membership.” The communiqué nonetheless offers hope here, signaling that the G7 aims to see WTO dispute settlement “function properly.”

On this front, the Biden administration’s strategy, it seems, is first to resolve disputes over the Trump tariffs imposed on G7 and other US allies, against which the allies retaliated. Resolving this dispute is politically tricky. The tariffs provide protection to the US steel industry, and that industry is in swing states that are critical for the 2022 election. The control of the US Senate and House are at stake. The Biden administration will thus proceed carefully, biding its time, consulting with labor union constituencies. Still, the two sides are making progress, agreeing to suspend new tariffs while they negotiate.

If the Biden administration can settle tariff disputes with its G7 allies, then maybe, just maybe, the US will be in a cleaner position to make concrete proposals to return to binding multilateral trade dispute settlement. Then the system might be “rule-based” once more.

Gregory Shaffer is Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine and author of Emerging Powers in the World Trading System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law.

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Consider the recent case of the Belarusian government’s hijacking of a Ryanair flight over its territory to grab the journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. The day after the audacious act, the European Council adopted a tough retaliatory package against Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka that including economic sanctions and flight restrictions.

The European Union’s early communications regarding the incident were far from perfect, with conflicting messages from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Transport Commissioner Adina Valean. And while the flight bans involving Belarusian airspace and airlines might hurt Lukashenka more than it seems—Belarus’s Belavia airline and overflight fees are a source of revenue for the regime—the real question will be whether the sanctions prove effective either at releasing Protasevich and Sapega or, at least, in deterring further aggressive actions by Belarus or its patron, Russia.

But in seizing Protasevich and Sapega from the air, Lukashenka didn’t just invite economic retaliation. He also placed the matter of his repressive rule in Belarus back on the EU agenda, from which it had been gradually slipping after the EU imposed sanctions last fall over his violent crackdown following an election widely viewed as fraudulent. He forced the EU to think through its Belarus strategy. From Lukashenka’s point of view, did Protasevich pose such an acute and immediate threat that detaining him was worth renewing the EU’s focus on Belarus? Or did Lukashenka miscalculate?

Or consider a similar case involving China. After the EU, alongside the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, announced sanctions on Chinese officials connected to human-rights violations in Xinjiang, China responded by sanctioning members of the European Parliament. Yet this took place right as the European Parliament was considering ratifying the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), an ambitious deal that had been negotiated since 2013 and that some saw as driving a wedge between Europeans and Americans on China policy. As a result, the European Parliament suspended ratification of the agreement. Did China “lift a heavy rock only to drop it on its foot”? Did Beijing think the European Parliament would not react to its sanctions or would be powerless to stop the ratification process?

So why the miscalculations and misunderstandings of the EU?

One explanation is the low expectations that are often attached to the EU’s endeavors. Observers regularly predict that the next crisis—debt, Eurozone, migration, populism and democratic backsliding, Brexit, or, even further back, the rejection of the proposed European Constitution—will spell the EU’s doom. Yet the EU has not, as of this writing, dissolved. As the journalist Caroline de Gruyter argues, its special genius is its ability to muddle along in the face of bad odds. It has in fact also shown a remarkable ability to bounce back from those bad odds, as illustrated by its historic deal on a COVID-19 relief package and Multiannual Financial Framework last summer.

Second, understanding how the EU works is not easy. This isn’t simply a matter of legal or institutional complexity. Rather, it is due to the EU being a strange creature: neither a state nor an international organization, with its politics playing out in a space that can be described as neither international affairs nor domestic matters. The European Commission isn’t quite the NATO International Staff or the United Nations Secretariat. This odd existence is best illustrated by Finland’s “two plates policy” disputes about whether the country’s president or prime minister (or both) should be attending European Council meetings.

Trying to anticipate EU reactions based on the ways states act in the international domain yields poor results. In particular, such an approach leads to underestimating the role and weight of the European Parliament, which has its own powers and democratic underpinnings—as it has repeatedly demonstrated.

Despite very close contacts and great familiarity with the EU, the United States and to some extent the United Kingdom sometimes have a difficult time reading European dynamics correctly or fully understanding the significance of the different moving pieces. How then can we expect, say, authoritarian China and Russia—with far less access to the EU and far less cultural and political proximity to it—to have a good grasp on European dynamics?

Third, the misunderstandings also highlight that Europe’s geopolitical transformation is incomplete. Having improvised in the face of multiple crises, the EU is, as Luuk van Middelaar argues, moving from a “politics of rules” to a “politics of events.” From Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the Bataclan terrorist attacks in 2015 to China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy in 2020, Europeans are also awakening to the realities of a more dangerous geopolitical environment. Over the past few years, they have started building the tools to respond to that environment—to the point where the recent launch of the European Peace Facility, designed to buy weapons for partner forces in other regions such as Africa, has even raised concerns about the very nature of the EU changing.

Yet that transformation remains partial. Europe is still learning to “speak the language of power,” as shown by EU High Representative Josep Borrell’s February trip to Moscow, where he was subjected to an aggressive press conference by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The halfway state is best illustrated by the dissonance between von der Leyen’s firm tweets about the detention of Protasevich and Valean’s initial reaction on Twitter, which seemed oblivious to the journalist’s fate. The transport commissioner’s portfolio largely exists in that quasi-domestic sphere of the “politics of rules,” removed from great-power politics, while the Commission president is striving to respond to events and bring about a “geopolitical Commission.”

The urgent task before Europe is to finish that transition. This must start with deepening Europe’s strategic culture, notably by ensuring that the Strategic Compass, the two-year effort for developing common threat analysis and thinking through what kind of international actor the EU wants to be, remains a political process and delivers practical recommendations. Yet “speaking the language of power” is not enough. Several tools and instruments with great potential—the 5G toolbox, a European Magnitsky Act, and the European Defence Fund, to name but a few—have been developed over the past years. Using them to their full extent will be the EU’s real test. What is required now is not institutional frameworks but political boldness.

Washington can help focus the European debate over these issues, in part by clarifying its intentions and expectations about burden-sharing. As Biden meets his European counterparts, strong messaging supporting Europe’s transformation toward a more geopolitical politics could, ultimately, help the United States find a more reliable partner across the Atlantic.

Olivier-Rémy Bel is a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council. He previously served as a European affairs staffer to the French minister of defense as well as head of the EU desk at the French Ministry of Defense’s Directorate General for International Relations and Strategy.

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Below, experts from Brookings’s Foreign Policy program describe what they are watching for, in terms of potential policy outcomes, developments in key relationships, and opportunities and things that could go wrong.

Biden has made it excessively clear that he seeks “stable and predictable” relations with Russia, and Putin can promise to restrain Russian hackers and to spare Ukraine another bout of military pressure. As a counter-claim, he can demand that no new waves of protests be allowed to topple the dictatorship in Belarus. Putin’s main message will inevitably be about the unacceptability of Western “interference” in Russian internal affairs, which means that his siloviki will keep persecuting the opposition and exterminating free media as they see fit. Biden cannot consent to that but an implicit “understanding” might emerge. The problem with establishing such boundaries of “stability” is greater than just damaging Biden’s agenda of strengthening democracy. Putin is predictable only in his desire to keep the initiative in his confrontation with the West, so he is apt to strike at the first opportune moment.

Célia Belin, Visiting Fellow, Center on the United States and Europe:

Although it is not yet on the formal agenda of the different summits, I will be watching for developments on trans-Atlantic travel. To this day, travel is still heavily restricted between the United States and Europe (specifically the Schengen area, United Kingdom, and Ireland), a 15-month purgatory with no end in sight. However, by the end of June, all 27 EU member states will have reopened their borders to American travelers — safety protocols varying with each country. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has yet to give any indication that it intends to reciprocate, or even to fix the dramatic visa backlog in its consulates in Europe. I will be looking at whether Europeans bring up the issue and the administration offers a path forward. As both sides are determined to identify a positive agenda out of President Biden’s Europe tour, the asymmetry created by the ongoing U.S. travel ban will be noticed. As Biden claims to be a “committed trans-Atlanticist,” relaxing rules for European travel would be a demonstration of trust and goodwill.

A larger question looms over the sequence: Can the G-7, and trans-Atlantic partners, regain a central role in designing global governance, and overcome nationalistic impulses? I will look at efforts towards building a sustainable recovery with new rules on corporate taxation. I also expect G-7 partners to demonstrate solidarity with the developing world, with progress on the number of vaccines being donated, efforts on debt relief, and increased pledges for climate finance.

James Goldgeier, Robert Bosch Senior Visiting Fellow, Center on the United States and Europe:

President Biden will go into his summit with President Putin in a strong position, having just come from a NATO summit that will emphasize the close alliance among the United States, Canada, and Europe. While both presidents have talked about the importance of strategic stability and arms control, fundamental divisions remain. Biden often discusses the importance of democracy, which Putin fears, and Biden continues to reiterate American support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, which Putin views as part of Russia’s privileged sphere of influence. Expect Putin to air his grievances against the United States, which he uses to try to deflect his responsibility for Russia’s continued economic stagnation. Biden, meanwhile, will do what his predecessor did not: make clear that continued Russian interference in American elections is unacceptable.

The days of U.S.-Russia summits with long fact sheets touting various agreements and initiatives are ancient history, but the two countries could pay lip service to their desire to cooperate on issues like the Arctic, Iran, and climate change. Biden has repeatedly stated his desire for a stable and predictable (i.e., boring) U.S.-Russia relationship that will enable the United States to keep its focus on China, and that seems to be the reason he offered the summit in the first place. Putin’s domestic challenges have led him to take a more aggressive foreign policy stance, so Biden’s hopes for quiet on the Russia front are likely to remain unfulfilled.

Samantha Gross, Fellow and Director, Energy Security and Climate Initiative:

The United Kingdom is hosting both the G-7 this week and the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) meeting in Glasgow in early November, two key meetings in this crucial year for climate action. London is keen to have the G-7 set the tone for a successful COP26.

The G-7 environment ministers met in May and made important commitments on climate, including setting goals in line with limiting global average temperature rise to 1.5°C, preserving 30% of land for nature by 2030, and eliminating funding for coal plants by the end of 2021. The coal decision was a particularly big step for Japan, which has been an important funder of coal plants abroad. At the summit, G-7 countries are likely to call for similar commitments from G-20 countries at their October summit in Rome.

Climate finance and trade are likely to be important issues at the summit. Many developing countries have climate goals that are conditional on financial aid, so success at the COP depends on greater commitment of funds from wealthy countries. The intersection of climate and trade is also a good fit for discussion at the G-7. The European Union plans to implement a carbon border adjustment mechanism to protect industries that pay Europe’s high carbon prices, but its implications for trade are complicated and untested. Working thorough the implications and ensuring that trade doesn’t become a stumbling block is an important task that the G-7 could take on.

Syaru Shirley Lin, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Center for East Asia Policy Studies:

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us that those who once seemed safe may not remain so, and that no one is safe until the whole world is. Democracies like Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan displayed stellar performance in fighting the pandemic early on, maintaining nearly normal life with low infections and few deaths. However, from India to Japan, among both rich and poor economies, Asia is now ravaged by new variants, revealing inadequate testing, insufficient vaccine production and procurement, and lax quarantines, compared with China’s successful management of the pandemic through massive testing and strict lockdowns.

The pandemic has also highlighted how many national governments and international organizations were unprepared to respond quickly and effectively. Fortunately, innovative public-private partnerships such as COVAX, Gavi, and Reform for Resilience are filling in the gap both to end the pandemic and to prepare for the next one. As the chair of Reform for Resilience’s Asia-Pacific hub, I see how Asian countries are depending on the G-7 to donate vaccines immediately and then to enlarge contract manufacturing of vaccines in Asia.

President Biden’s trip is an opportunity for the U.S. and G-7 to develop a new mechanism that unites democratic governments with research institutions and the private sector to end this pandemic. This is a wake-up call for the G-7 to create more robust healthcare systems, resilient economies, and sustainable environments, all of which will prepare us better for the next pandemic, whose arrival is only a matter of time.

Suzanne Maloney, Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy:

As President Biden embarks on his first foreign trip, he has set an ambitious agenda — rebuilding America’s relationships with its closest allies and rallying the world’s democracies around a common goal of thwarting the implicit and explicit creep of authoritarianism. It is a noble aim, and a necessary endeavor, but neither a frenzy of summitry nor soaring rhetoric are the best means to achieve it.

After the epic disruption of Trump-era policies, Washington’s European allies will welcome the reassurance with a skeptical eye. Biden’s readiness to reengage must overcome not just the scars of the past four years, but also the continuing questions about the health of America’s own democracy as well as traditional resistance to any sense of a domineering Washington. And while our shared values and interests underpin the relationship, there is — and always has been — some divergence among our allies about how to advance them.

The good news is that this administration is well-suited to meet the needs of the moment. Biden himself has more foreign policy experience than any of his recent predecessors, and his track record is one of realism, not overreach. Moreover, he has spent the first five months of his presidency demonstrating America’s capacity for steady competence on the home front by marshaling the resources of the federal government to turn the tide against the historic challenge of the coronavirus pandemic. His administration should prioritize the same approach — consistency and efficacy — in addressing the systemic challenge posed by authoritarian great powers.

Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow and Co-Director, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology:

When President Biden meets President Putin in Geneva on June 16, he needs a big idea for future European security. Meeting for its own sake may be useful but only marginally. We need a strategy and a vision.

Specifically, it is time to rethink NATO’s standing desire to push the alliance further east — a policy virtually guaranteed to continue to produce a higher state of tension and greater risk of war than would otherwise characterize the West’s relationship with Russia. A new security architecture should seek to reverse verifiably Russia’s aggressions against its neighbors while creating a non-aligned zone among those eastern European countries not currently in NATO.

NATO was not created, and should not now be used, in an attempt to solve every European political or security problem. Nor was its original intent to expand. It started with just 12 members. It only added four in the course of the next 40 years — Germany, Turkey, Greece, and Spain. The goal was never growth for growth’s sake. Nor was NATO seen primarily as a tool for democracy promotion.

Moreover, the practical effect of attempting to enlarge NATO into these countries has arguably been to set back Russian relations with the West enormously. To be sure, the main fault is with Russia’s behavior; NATO should not apologize for past expansion. But the idea of further NATO expansion is the main policy that the West can and should rethink.

Patrick W. Quirk, Nonresident Fellow, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology:

We are beginning to see the silhouette of the Biden administration’s democracy agenda, as the White House translates the president’s rhetorical commitment to prioritize supporting democracy and human rights in U.S. foreign policy into action. Last week, for example, the U.S. released a National Security Study Memorandum designating fighting corruption abroad as a core national security interest.

A key question going into the G-7 meeting is not whether the group will commit to supporting democracy abroad (they already have) but what they will promise to do together to achieve this goal.

The G-7 members are expected to codify a global minimum corporate tax rate. Can we expect something of similar ambition from the group’s discussion on “championing shared values including democracy and human rights”? One would hope so since whether democracy or autocracy predominates globally is more important than the percentage of profits which corporations hand over.

Commitments on how the seven — in concert with like-minded democracies, perhaps led by the D-10 including invited G-7 guests India, Australia, and South Korea — will protect and promote democracy would be welcome. They might commit to increasing support for strengthening institutions and civil society in fledgling democracies so that citizens instead of predatory elites thrive. They might also outline how allies will help protect democracy from Chinese and Russian malign influence, via standard repercussions and more proactive steps to shore up vulnerable countries.

This week will give greater shape to how the White House intends to translate promises on democracy into tangible action.

Douglas A. Rediker, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Center on the United States and Europe:

When President Biden meets his G-7 counterparts this week, the meeting will be heavy on signaling that the G-7 is back. In 2009, as the global financial crisis raged, it was the G-20, not the G-7 (G-8 at the time) where leaders and finance officials successfully signaled that even countries with different ideologies and political systems could work together for the common good. The larger G-20 grouping effectively eclipsed the G-7 in the following decade, but though its agenda expanded, the results delivered did not.

This week’s G-7 will also include Australia, India, and South Korea, signaling that the G-7 is now the principal forum where multilateral approaches to global issues will be hashed out among countries sharing democratic values, in hopes of making tangible progress in tackling current crises like COVID-19 response and climate. By reenergizing the G-7, the British hosts, Biden, and other attendees are signaling that when the wider G-20 meets, coordinated positions will have already been agreed, effectively presenting other G-20 countries, including China and Russia, with what is effectively a fait accompli. China has already reacted, arguing that “the G7 has no right to and should not exclude developing countries or other platforms for multilateral governance.”

This week’s G-7 is another reflection of the Biden administration’s framing of the world into democracies and autocracies. It could also signal that what is left of the halcyon era of efforts at global cooperation is over, and with it, the primacy of the G-20.

Constanze Stelzenmüller, Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and Trans-Atlantic Relations, Center on the United States and Europe:

The weekend’s historic G-7 agreement on global corporate tax rates could be a gamechanger for the trans-Atlantic trade relationship; German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrats’ chancellor candidate, is already celebrating it as a victory. Are U.S.-German relations back on track after all?

Not quite. It is notable that the Biden administration faced down a heavy bipartisan drumbeat for sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in May for the sake of improving relations with Germany — yet the president is about to spend a week in Europe without going to Berlin.

Meanwhile, President Putin has casually upended a key argument fielded by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to defend the project. Under an agreement negotiated by Berlin with the Kremlin, Russia was supposed to maintain its Ukrainian gas transit route until 2024. Yet on Friday Putin told a conference that Ukraine would have to show “good will” if it wanted to keep the transit route: a public slap in the face for Germany.

Much is at stake for Germany in this week’s summits — not least whether the successor to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (whose term ends in 2022) might be German; the name of Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who is popular among her peers, was floated this week. So it might be time for Berlin to take a hard look at the relative strategic value of its relationships with the U.S. and Russia. One potential outcome could be to reconsider its opposition to a moratorium on the pipeline.

Thomas Wright, Director, Center on the United States and Europe:

The White House sees President Biden’s forthcoming trip to Europe as a demonstration that “America is back” after four years of President Donald Trump. There is a considerable risk that this message will fall flat. There is little appetite on either side of the Atlantic for a return to the Obama administration’s Europe policy. Europeans follow American politics and understand that Trumpism is not dead and could make a comeback in elections in 2022 or 2024. Meanwhile, as Jeremy Shapiro recently argued, many Biden administration officials are skeptical that Europe can or will do much to help the United States in its competition with China.

Biden is unique among American presidents in his long-established engagement with and affinity for the Atlantic alliance. He should use this trip to set out his vision for how that alliance should change in decades to come. This must include serious consideration of helping the EU become more autonomous and capable, fleshing out an economic agenda for the alliance, showing how the U.S. can help support liberal democracy in Europe, rethinking NATO’s 2% of GDP defense spending metric so it is better suited for an era of competition with China, and encouraging continuing security cooperation between the U.K. and EU. Going big would ensure Europe is more resilient to a return of Trumpism, and better positioned to compete with China for its own reasons. But this is unlikely to happen on this trip, so it will probably have to wait a while longer.

Pavel Baev is a nonresident senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings and a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)

Célia Belin is a visiting fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings. Her areas of expertise include trans-Atlantic relations, U.S. foreign policy toward Europe, French politics and foreign policy, the role of civil society in foreign policy, religion/secularism, and strategic prospective analysis.

James Goldgeier is a Robert Bosch senior visiting fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and a professor of international relations at the School of International Service at American University, where he served as dean from 2011-17.

Samantha Gross is a fellow and director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative. Her work is focused on the intersection of energy, environment, and policy, including climate policy and international cooperation, energy efficiency, unconventional oil and gas development, regional and global natural gas trade, and the energy-water nexus.

Syaru Shirley Lin is a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and Compton Visiting Professor in World Politics at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Suzanne Maloney is the vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where her research focuses on Iran and Persian Gulf energy. She has served as the deputy director of the Foreign Policy for the past five years.

Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow, and director of research, in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy.

Patrick W. Quirk is senior director of the Center for Global Impact at the International Republican Institute (IRI) and a nonresident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. Previously, he served on the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning (S/P) staff in the Department of State as the lead advisor for fragile states, conflict and stabilization, and foreign assistance.

Douglas A. Rediker is a nonresident senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings, as well as in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program. He is also the founding partner of International Capital Strategies, LLC, a Washington, DC-based political economy consultancy founded in 2012 and a member of the board of directors of Cowen Inc

Constanze Stelzenmüller is an expert on German, European, and trans-Atlantic foreign and security policy and strategy. She is the inaugural holder of the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings.

Thomas Wright is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. He is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy

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It will be their first real opportunity since then to work out a collective response to the enormous test posed by the pandemic, as well as three other global challenges – climate change, the accelerating digitization of the global economy and growing strategic competition between the West and China. 

As well as substantive outcomes the summit delivers, it will also be an opportunity for leaders to consider what role the G7 should play over the next decade or longer.  

The grouping was formed when six of the current members – the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan, France and Italy – first met at the Chateau de Rambouillet in 1975 in the aftermath of the first oil shock. Canada and the EU were invited to join the group shortly afterwards . In these years, if agreement could be reached on an aspect of managing the global economy – initiating a fiscal stimulus, completing a global trade negotiation, restructuring developing country debt or boosting international aid – it was typically decisive.

This situation largely prevailed through to the early 2000s, when the G7’s influence began to decline. Driven primarily by its declining share of world economic activity as a result of the rapid growth in China and other emerging economies, the G7 also faced an increasing diversity of global players with the growth in international civil society and multinational corporations. 

The change in status was recognized in the response to the 2008-9 global financial crisis. While G7 finance ministers and central bank governors played a pivotal role in preparing the ground, it was the G20 major economies that delivered the response to the crisis.

As the G20 took centre stage, there were doubts as to whether the G7 – or G8 as it then was with the participation of Russia – had a future at all. Many thought, or at least hoped, that the G20 would be able to continue its unity of purpose.

Over its next five summits, however, the G7/G8 demonstrated its value, not just in terms of the nature of the discussions that were uniquely possible among its leaders, reflecting their shared culture, values and personal familiarity, but also through the specific outcomes it achieved. 

The group remained a critical forum for addressing economic crises – such as the Eurozone crisis –that originated or were contained within its membership. It developed new approaches to solving global problems that could be mainstreamed through wider bodies, particularly the G20.

With Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the G7 quickly became a focus for major differences between the US and its traditional allies. By contrast the Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, together with its continued commitment to multilateralism outside the EU, has, if anything, increased the logic for the G7. 

The new Biden administration’s energetic support for coordination with allies and willingness to lead on such controversial issues as global tax arrangements and a Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights waiver for vaccines, combined with the greatest period of economic upheaval since the Second World War, means that the G7 now has a unique opportunity to evolve. 

To achieve this, there are four issues on which G7 leaders need to reach agreement in Cornwall.

First, they need to reaffirm their shared values, highlighting their belief in democracy, human rights, support for the free market and economic openness. This should be much easier now that Trump has left office, but there could still be areas in which it will be difficult to reach consensus, for example on the role of the state and the G7’s stance on free trade. The leaders will also need to consider how to put these values into effect. 

Second, the group needs to be clear about what it can and cannot do. It no longer has the economic scope, financial resources or legitimacy to solve the world’s biggest challenges on its own – not in the short term as we have seen with the roll out of Covid vaccines to the developing world, or longer term as seen with unsustainable developing country debt and climate change. Short of morphing into the G20, it cannot aspire to this. 

The group should be clear, however, that it does see itself as having a core responsibility to come up with and champion approaches that can effectively address these problems and that do so in a way that is equitable and reflects the concerns of the wider international community. 

Third, the group should acknowledge that a further core responsibility will be to provide a forum in which its members can coordinate policies to uphold shared economic values and interests, including when these are in competition with other economies. 

And fourth, the G7 needs to explain how, taking account of these values and roles, it will work constructively with other economies and the global governance architecture. In a practical sense this is the most important, both in terms of the group’s ability to influence the international agenda and in the example it sets to other major economies. It is also the most difficult. 

The lead on solving some global issues – such as climate finance, recovery from the pandemic, reform of the global tax system and developing-country debt – must necessarily lie ultimately with the G20. 

Others – such as resilience in supply chains, digital governance and national security considerations in investment – may need to be dealt with at a G7 level among close allies but could still be tied into more universal frameworks of benefit to all. 

The G7 will need to balance finding global solutions to global problems with parallel efforts to underpin the values and economic interests of its members and find a way to communicate this sympathetically. 

Apart from the inevitable ‘not invented here’ syndrome, there is a risk the wider world will distrust G7 initiatives intended for the greater good if they are presented alongside actions that are focused on upholding common group interests.  To counter this the G7 will need to persuade sceptics – through practical examples – that competition in some areas can coexist with cooperation in others. 

To complement greater clarity on its new role, the G7 should take stock of how it can maximize its effectiveness.  In principle, the presidency needs the consent of other members for the decisions it takes on summit organisation. This is rarely withheld, but any change of approach will only become permanent if actively supported by other members and adopted by subsequent presidencies.

There have been several attempts by individual presidencies to review the effectiveness of the institution and hardwire the conclusions into future practice.  These have had mixed results at best. But there are four themes on which the group should try again to reach a consensus in Cornwall.

First, expansion: The success of the G7 depends on the like-mindedness of its participants, the fact that the leaders typically get to know each other well, and that the group is small enough to sit round a medium sized dining table. 

It should therefore set a high bar for any permanent expansion and potentially rule it out for the foreseeable future. It is particularly important to avoid including new members who would prevent discussion of core national economic security interests – as was the case when Russia was a member. 

Second, scope: The G7 has ranged across economic, social and political issues, and this should continue. Similarly, a successful theme may be inspired by an immediate crisis or be a slower-burn, second-tier topic that deserves to rise to the top tier. 

But the most successful presidencies have almost always had limited agendas focused on one or two themes where effective outcomes can only be achieved through international cooperation. The G7 should establish this approach as a norm with the summit tackling at most three closely related themes or two unrelated themes. 

Third, outreach: Both the G7 and G20 have experimented with a range of outreach approaches to countries, international organizations and non-official stakeholders. Sometimes these have been valuable, but too often they have been largely cosmetic and potentially counterproductive. It should be a priority to work out what works and what doesn’t.

Specific steps should include: identifying areas where outside expertise or political support is critical to a chosen theme and embedding outreach to specific countries, institutions or individuals from the outset; avoiding permanent institutionalized groups of stakeholders rolling over from one presidency to the next, since these can easily become divorced from the presidency agenda and an end in themselves; and ensuring that any high-level independent expert group established to investigate aspects of a chosen theme publishes recommendations well before the final outputs for the summit are locked down.

Fourth, tools and working methods: Covid has transformed the way the G7 and G20 groups have worked over the past year, with  most preparatory meetings and contact between leaders happening virtually. It is critical to capture the best of virtual working in future practice, while recognizing that a complete lack of personal contact is a major drawback. 

One approach might be to cut the number of in-person ‘Sherpa’ meetings from four to two and add four shorter virtual sessions. The G7 needs to make sure it has communications that are secure enough to meet the needs of its growing role in economic security.

During the Cornwall summit, the British presidency has a rare opportunity to communicate a clear vision of what the G7 is for and how it will operate in the future. This would be an important contribution to the wider system of global governance, enhancing the influence of the individual G7 members and setting an example to similar groups in what could otherwise become an increasingly fragmented and dysfunctional system. 

We should all hope that it steps up to this challenge. 

Creon Butler joined Chatham House from the Cabinet Office where he served as director for international economic affairs in the National Security Secretariat and G7/G20 ‘sous sherpa’, advising on global policy issues such as climate change, natural resource security, global health threats and the future of the international economic architecture. Earlier in his career, he served in the Bank of England, HM Treasury and in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where he was director for economic policy and chief economic adviser.

To read the full commentary from Chatham House, please click here.

Image from metro.co.uk

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Despite some progress, the G7 have so far failed to adequately commit to the urgent need to tackle ever growing natural resource consumption and generation of waste – the primary drivers of climate change, biodiversity loss and many other environmental and geopolitical challenges.

Looking beyond the G7 towards upcoming summits, such as COP26 and the G20, this article will outline three principles for a truly global green recovery: efficiency, sufficiency and fairness.

The climate emergency and COVID-19 pandemic have exposed and exacerbated major cracks in the foundations of the neoliberal economic model – the rise of nationalism and protectionism, growing wealth inequality, fragile global supply chains, uneven access to basic human needs and worker exploitation. It is no coincidence that society is experiencing them simultaneously as they are, by and large, symptoms of the same underlying cause – the global race to endlessly maximize and capture economic growth through resource consumption.

In 2019, for the first time in history, humanity consumed over 100 billion tonnes of the earth’s resources in just one year. Extraction and processing of natural resources is responsible for approximately half of the world’s carbon emissions and 90 per cent of biodiversity loss. Such high rates of resource consumption are causing, and will continue to cause, irreparable damage to ecosystems.

A green recovery from the pandemic is a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to address these issues and to make the economic system greener, fairer and more resilient. The green recovery took centre stage at the G7 with the announcement of the B3W partnership and expressed support for the transition to sustainable management and use of natural resources. But what does sustainable management and use of natural resources mean in the context of a global green recovery?

Is Green Growth the Answer to a Green Recovery?

Many argue that the green recovery should be underpinned by pursuing green growth – in other words growing the economy while simultaneously reducing environmental impact through increasing material and energy efficiency. The EU’s €1.8 trillion post-COVID-19 fund and President Biden’s $6 trillion stimulus package proposal are prime examples of the green growth agenda, as is the B3W with its commitment to accelerating ‘clean and green growth’.

Assuming that all green recovery fiscal stimulus packages focus entirely on green investments – setting aside the fact that, to date, most of them have largely failed at this – there remains no empirical evidenceto suggest that green growth driven by efficiency gain has been – or can be – achieved anywhere near the scale needed to prevent dangerous climate change and other dimensions of ecological breakdown.

The reason for this is that efficiency gain is the driver of economic growth. The more efficient your economy becomes, the faster it grows and the more resources it consumes – otherwise known as the Jevons paradox.

For the G7 to keep their promise of ‘protecting at least 30 per cent of global land and at least 30 per cent of the global ocean by 2030’ and ‘support the transition to sustainable management and use of natural resources’ they must look beyond simply curtailing waste and consider how to absolutely reduce natural resource consumption in a fair manner.

The summation of all of this is simple but stark. A green recovery dependent on green growth may reduce carbon emissions, but it will continue to accelerate natural resource consumption and therefore the destruction of the natural world.

This poses a difficult but essential question for global leaders: how can B3W ensure sustainable management and use of natural resources under a growth-based scenario?

Three Principles for a Global Green Recovery

Many leading thinkers have sought to answer this question with ideas such as Doughnut Economics, Wellbeing economics, Degrowth or the Safe Operating Space. But despite increasing political traction, these ideas have yet to be translated into binding multilateral agreements. With 2021 being the ‘super year’ for the environment, there has never been a better time to convert these ideas into action. What is needed for a truly global green recovery are the principles of efficiency, sufficiency and fairness.

Efficiency: Circular use of materials and energy
There is no way the world can remain within the 1.5°C target or address biodiversity loss without massive resource efficiency gains. The G7 must reaffirm their commitment to the Bologna roadmap which aims to coordinate and progress actions to increase resource efficiency and transition to a more circular economy. The goal of the circular economy is simple: to design out waste and pollution by keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible. Resource efficiency and circular economy should be deeply integrated into the B3W initiative.

However, efficiency gain on its own is not enough to overcome the accelerated resource demand fuelled by the need for constant economic (green) growth – for that we turn to sufficiency.

Sufficiency: An adequate amount of something essential
Sufficiency means consuming the right quantity of material goods and services necessary for optimal health and wellbeing — avoiding underconsumption (poverty) but also conspicuous overconsumption (environmental destruction). Sufficiency is growth agnostic in that it promotes growth where it is needed to eliminate poverty and in economic activities which are beneficial to people and the planet, such as renewable energy or the caring economy. In this respect, the G7 commitment to support clean and green growth in low-income countries is commendable and essential. But to allow developing countries the space to grow within the planetary boundaries, developed countries must also significantly curtail their levels of consumption.

Achieving sufficiency is not necessarily contrary to proponents of green growth. If proponents of green growth are in fact correct, and it is feasible to decouple economic growth from material and energy consumption, placing a moratorium on resource extraction – like the cap on carbon emissions agreed through the Paris Agreement – will only serve to complement this goal. A multilateral agreement on a ‘Safe Operating Space’ is required to ensure fair and sustainable management of natural resources.

Fairness: Reduce inequality through redistribution
Critical to achieving sufficiency is fair redistribution. There is an urgent need to strengthen resource equality and redistribution, both within and across nations, to ensure that all communities have the necessary resources, capacity and material share to deliver wellbeing. Wealth accumulation also needs to be distributed fairly to those who contributed to it, including the public sector where it can be reinvested into more resource efficient public goods and services such as public transport, healthcare and education.

Finally, any global recovery must also put a just transition front and centre. Many people’s jobs and livelihoods – particularly the poorest – are, and will continue to be, affected by the transition to a wellbeing economy, as well as the effects of climate change. The $100 billion per year climate finance fund and financing for the Sustainable Development Goals to achieve the human development targets for 2030 should be substantially increased to support this transition.

In conclusion, the G7 have shown leadership in committing to the B3W partnership and recognizing the need for sustainable management and use of natural resources. But the question remains: what does sustainable natural resource management mean in the context of building back better? The principles of efficiency, sufficiency and fairness could serve as the framework for world leaders to address this question at the upcoming G20 and COP26 summits.

Dr Jack Barrie is an expert on the topic of the circular economy. He holds a PhD from University of Strathclyde on circular economy innovation policy, and previously held the role of Schmidt-MacArthur fellow with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Patrick Schröder is a senior research fellow in the Energy, Environment and Resources department. At Chatham House he specializes in research on the global transition to an inclusive circular economy with a specific focus on collaborative opportunities between key countries, closing the investment gap and building an evidence base for trade in the circular economy.

To read the full commentary from Chatham House, please click here.

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