Seven of the world’s wealthiest democracies met in the Bavarian Alps this week trying to demonstrate that the Western coalition assembled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remains capable of shaping international politics.
The leaders of the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan gathered at Schloss Elmau for the G7 summit. Ukraine dominated much of the discussion, but the agenda extended far beyond the battlefield. Leaders discussed additional sanctions on Russia, energy security, food shortages, inflation and a possible mechanism for limiting the price Russia receives for exported oil. They also announced a new infrastructure initiative intended to mobilise hundreds of billions of dollars for developing countries.
Taken together, the announcements reveal something larger than the individual policies.
The G7 is trying to answer a question about its own relevance.
For several decades after the Cold War, Western economic and political power was sufficiently dominant that institutions led by the United States and its allies could often set much of the agenda for the international system. That world is changing.
China is now the world’s second-largest economy and the largest trading partner for a huge number of countries. India is becoming increasingly economically and strategically important. Southeast Asia continues growing. African countries will account for an increasing share of global population over the coming decades. Middle powers such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Brazil possess enough economic or geopolitical weight to resist pressure from larger blocs.
The G7 remains extraordinarily powerful.
It is no longer sufficient by itself.
That distinction may define international politics over the next several decades.
The seven countries still possess enormous structural advantages. The United States remains the world’s dominant military power. The dollar sits at the centre of international finance. European economies collectively form one of the world’s largest markets. Japan remains a major technological and industrial power. G7 countries exercise substantial influence through the IMF, World Bank, financial regulation, technology standards and multinational corporations.
Russia has discovered how consequential those networks can be. Western governments have frozen assets, restricted Russian banks, imposed technology controls and coordinated sanctions on a scale that would be impossible without their central role in global finance.
Economic power therefore does not disappear simply because the Western share of world GDP declines.
But power and legitimacy are different resources.
The G7 can coordinate among itself.
It cannot automatically persuade everyone else that its priorities should become global priorities.
Ukraine demonstrates this clearly.
From the perspective of the United States and most European governments, Russia’s invasion presents a relatively straightforward violation of sovereignty. A larger state crossed an internationally recognised border and attempted to change another country’s political and territorial arrangements through military force.
That principle matters enormously.
Yet many governments across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East have resisted joining Western sanctions.
India is one of the most important examples.
Delhi has condemned civilian deaths, called for diplomacy and emphasised respect for international law, but it has not joined the Western sanctions regime and has continued purchasing Russian energy.
From Washington, this can look frustratingly ambiguous.
From Delhi, the calculation is different.
India has maintained a close defence relationship with Russia for decades. Large parts of India’s military equipment originate from the Soviet Union or Russia. Moscow has historically provided diplomatic support to India on issues important to Delhi. India also needs affordable energy, particularly when global oil prices are high.
At the same time, India has developed a much deeper strategic relationship with the United States, Japan and Australia through the Quad because of concerns about China.
India therefore does not want to become part of a Russian bloc.
It also does not want the United States to determine every Indian relationship.
That is strategic autonomy.
The concept can look inconsistent if international politics is viewed primarily through alliances.
It becomes much more coherent if states are assumed to maximise room for manoeuvre.
India wants American cooperation against Chinese power without becoming dependent on America.
It wants Russian defence and energy relationships without becoming dependent on Russia.
It wants stronger relationships with Europe, Japan and Southeast Asia simultaneously.
That is not neutrality.
It is diversification.
The same logic increasingly appears across the developing world.
Countries do not necessarily want to choose between Washington and Beijing.
They want American security cooperation, Chinese infrastructure investment, European markets, Russian commodities and regional relationships at the same time.
Great powers prefer blocs because blocs simplify alignment.
Middle powers often prefer options.
This is one reason describing the current international system as another Cold War may be misleading.
During the original Cold War, many countries also pursued non-alignment, so even that period was more complicated than two perfectly separated camps. But the economic interdependence of the current world makes binary alignment even more difficult.
China and the United States compete strategically while trading enormous quantities with one another.
European companies depend on Chinese supply chains.
India cooperates with America through the Quad while participating in BRICS with China and Russia.
Turkey belongs to NATO while maintaining a complicated relationship with Moscow.
Saudi Arabia depends heavily on American security relationships while deepening economic links with China.
The international system is becoming multiplex rather than simply multipolar.
Countries can align differently depending on the issue.
India can align with the United States on Indo-Pacific security, with developing countries on climate finance and with Russia on particular diplomatic or economic questions.
That makes coalition-building harder.
It also gives middle powers more leverage.
This is the environment in which the G7 announced its Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment.
The initiative aims to mobilise $600 billion by 2027 in public and private investment for infrastructure in developing countries, including projects involving climate, health, digital connectivity and other areas.
The proposal is widely understood partly as a response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
That comparison is revealing.
For years, Western governments criticised aspects of Chinese overseas infrastructure financing, including concerns about debt sustainability, transparency, environmental standards and Beijing’s strategic influence.
Some of those criticisms are justified.
But criticism alone does not build a railway.
If a developing country needs a port, electricity grid, broadband network or railway, telling its government that Chinese financing contains geopolitical risks is much less persuasive when nobody offers another source of capital.
Competition therefore changes the Western response.
Instead of merely saying do not take China’s offer, the G7 increasingly needs to say here is another offer.
That may be healthier for developing countries.
Competition among sources of infrastructure finance can increase bargaining power for recipients.
If a government can choose between Chinese, Western, Japanese, Gulf or multilateral financing, it can negotiate better terms and reduce dependence on one provider.
Again, diversification creates autonomy.
This is where geopolitical competition can sometimes produce useful public goods.
The United States and China may invest more in developing countries partly because each fears losing influence to the other.
Their motive may be strategic.
The bridge still gets built.
Motives and outcomes should be analysed separately.
A policy does not become useless because the government pursuing it has geopolitical interests.
Almost every major development programme contains multiple objectives.
The more important questions are whether projects are economically viable, whether recipient countries actually want them, how debt is structured, whether procurement is transparent and whether local communities receive meaningful benefits.
The $600 billion headline therefore deserves caution.
“Mobilise” is not the same thing as governments spending $600 billion directly.
Much of the initiative is expected to involve private capital and other financing mechanisms.
Political announcements frequently use large aggregate numbers because they signal ambition.
Implementation determines whether the number becomes meaningful.
This is where China’s Belt and Road Initiative possesses an important advantage: Beijing has spent years building institutions and relationships capable of financing and constructing projects rapidly.
Western governments often have more complicated procurement, environmental and financing requirements.
Those standards can protect taxpayers, workers and recipient countries.
They can also make projects slower.
Again, institutional quality and speed can trade off.
A developing country facing an urgent infrastructure shortage may reasonably value speed more highly than a donor government expects.
The G7 therefore cannot compete effectively simply by insisting its financing is normatively superior.
It needs to deliver.
This connects to Biden’s Summit for Democracy last December. Democracies increasingly argue that their political and economic model is preferable to authoritarian alternatives.
That argument becomes more persuasive when democratic institutions produce tangible outcomes.
A village receiving electricity does not experience “rules-based international order” directly.
It experiences electricity.
A government needing a port does not evaluate geopolitical competition only through speeches about democracy.
It evaluates financing terms, construction timelines and economic returns.
This is where the West sometimes confuses the attractiveness of its values with the attractiveness of every policy it offers.
Liberal democracy possesses strong normative advantages.
That does not mean developing countries will accept a worse commercial deal simply because it comes from a democracy.
Values matter.
So do interest rates.
There is also a historical problem with Western appeals to a rules-based international order.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a serious violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.
That does not erase memories of Western interventions elsewhere.
Governments and citizens across the Global South remember Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the history of colonialism differently from Western political elites.
This does not make Russia’s invasion legitimate.
Two wrongs do not cancel one another.
But credibility is cumulative.
When a country invokes international law selectively, future appeals to international law become less persuasive.
This is similar to the institutional trust problem I have written about domestically.
Rules become more legitimate when people believe they apply consistently.
If powerful countries appear to demand strict adherence from rivals while interpreting their own actions more generously, weaker states become sceptical of whether the rule is really universal.
That scepticism should not simply be dismissed as Russian propaganda.
Russia certainly exploits Western inconsistencies rhetorically.
The inconsistencies can still exist.
The strongest response is greater consistency, not pretending history did not happen.
This is particularly relevant when Western governments ask developing countries to absorb economic costs from sanctions.
Europe can argue that higher energy prices are a necessary cost of resisting Russian aggression.
An African or South Asian government facing food inflation may ask why its citizens should bear those costs when their responsibility for the conflict is negligible.
That is not moral indifference.
It is distributional politics at the international level.
The benefits of defending a norm may be global.
The costs are not distributed equally.
Countries with higher incomes possess greater fiscal capacity to cushion households from energy and food shocks.
Poorer governments have much less room.
If Western leaders want broader cooperation, they need to recognise those constraints rather than treating non-participation as evidence of insufficient commitment to international law.
This is where food security has become especially important. Russia and Ukraine are major agricultural exporters, and the war has disrupted supplies and contributed to higher global food prices.
Countries heavily dependent on imported grain face consequences they did not create.
The G7 therefore cannot treat Ukraine policy separately from the global economic effects of Ukraine policy.
Foreign policy operates through markets.
Again, sanctions, war, energy and food become one system.
This may be the deeper meaning of the G7’s current challenge.
The organisation was created when its members represented a much larger share of global economic output. The world economy has changed faster than global governance has.
The G20 partly reflects that shift by including China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and other major economies.
But the G20 becomes harder to use when members fundamentally disagree about issues such as Russia.
The G7 is easier to coordinate because its members share more political and strategic assumptions.
So the international system faces another institutional trade-off:
smaller groups are easier to coordinate but less representative; larger groups are more representative but harder to coordinate.
The G7 has cohesion.
The G20 has broader legitimacy.
Neither gives policymakers everything they want.
This resembles the domestic institutional trade-offs I have been writing about all year.
A large coalition incorporates more interests but makes decisions more difficult.
A smaller coalition acts faster but excludes more people.
International institutions confront the same problem because they are political institutions at a different scale.
Perhaps the G7’s future therefore lies not in pretending to govern the world, but in functioning as a coordination mechanism among wealthy democracies that then has to bargain seriously with everyone else.
That would require a change in political language.
The Global South is not a passive audience waiting to decide whether the Western or Chinese model is more attractive.
Its countries are actors.
They possess their own interests.
India does not exist to complete America’s China strategy.
Indonesia does not exist to validate Western sanctions.
African governments do not exist merely as locations for Chinese or Western infrastructure competition.
Treating them as geopolitical prizes reproduces the great-power politics Western governments often claim to oppose.
Real partnership means accepting that partner governments sometimes say no.
This is where the $600 billion infrastructure initiative will ultimately be tested.
If projects are designed principally around what G7 governments want to achieve strategically, recipient countries will notice.
If projects respond to actual development priorities while offering transparent and sustainable financing, the strategic benefits may follow naturally.
Influence is often strongest when it is produced indirectly through usefulness.
China understood this early with infrastructure diplomacy.
The West appears to be learning it.
The G7 still possesses enormous power. Its economies, financial systems, technologies and military capabilities remain central to the world order.
But the distribution of global power is changing.
The response cannot simply be defending the hierarchy that existed in 1995.
It has to involve constructing institutions and partnerships attractive enough that other countries voluntarily continue participating.
That is a much harder form of leadership.
Command works when power is overwhelmingly asymmetric.
Coalition-building becomes necessary when others possess alternatives.
The G7 summit this week therefore matters less because seven leaders agreed on another sanctions package or posed for photographs in Bavaria.
It matters because those seven governments are beginning to confront a world in which being wealthy and powerful does not automatically make them representative.
Russia’s invasion has temporarily strengthened Western unity.
China’s rise has strengthened incentives for Western coordination.
Neither guarantees that the rest of the world will align automatically.
The emerging international order may therefore be defined less by two fixed blocs than by constant competition for countries that prefer not to belong completely to either.
That gives those countries more agency than great-power narratives usually acknowledge.
Perhaps that is what multipolarity looks like in practice.
Not several empires dividing the map between them.
A much messier world in which dozens of states possess enough alternatives to negotiate.
The G7 can remain extraordinarily influential in that world.
But influence will increasingly have to be earned rather than assumed.
