[News] Group Of Seven Should Finally Be Shut Down

[Anti-Imperialist News]

popularresistance.org
<https://popularresistance.org/group-of-seven-should-finally-be-shut-down/>
Group Of Seven Should Finally Be Shut Down
By Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute For Social Research.
10–13 minutes
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[image: image.png]

Above Photo: Leon Golub (USA), Vietnam II, 1973.

During the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit, the leaders of Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States
visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, near where the meeting was
held. Not doing so would have been an act of immense discourtesy. Despite
many calls for an apology from the US for dropping an atomic bomb on a
civilian population in 1945, US President Joe Biden has demurred
<https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2023/05/c89d25ee10b8-biden-not-to-issue-apology-in-hiroshima-for-us-use-of-atomic-bomb.html>.
Instead, he wrote
<https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/05/20/national/politics-diplomacy/g7-leaders-hiroshima-museum-guestbook/>
in the Peace Memorial guest book: ‘May the stories of this museum remind us
all of our obligations to build a future of peace’.

Apologies, amplified by the tensions of our time, take on interesting
sociological and political roles. An apology would suggest that the 1945
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong and that the US did not end
their war against Japan by taking the moral high ground. An apology would
also contradict the US’s decision, backed fully by other Western powers
over 70 years later, to maintain a military presence along the Asian
coastline of the Pacific Ocean (a presence built on the back of the 1945
atomic bombings) and to use that military force to threaten China with
weapons of mass destruction amassed in bases and ships close to China’s
territorial waters. It is impossible to imagine a ‘future of peace’ if the
US continues to maintain its aggressive military structure that runs from
Japan to Australia, with the express intent of disciplining China.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was given the errand to warn China about its
‘economic coercion’ as he unveiled
<https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-to-rally-g7-on-protecting-economy-from-state-threats>
the G7 Coordination Platform on Economic Coercion to track Chinese
commercial activities. ‘The platform will address the growing and
pernicious use of coercive economic measures to interfere in the sovereign
affairs of other states’, Sunak said. This bizarre language displayed
neither self-awareness of the West’s long history of brutal colonialism nor
an acknowledgement of neocolonial structures – including the permanent
state of indebtedness enforced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) –
that are coercive by definition. Nonetheless, Sunak, Biden, and the others
preened with self-righteous certainty that their moral standing remains
intact and that they hold the right to attack China for its trade
agreements. These leaders suggest that it is perfectly acceptable for the
IMF – on behalf of the G7 states – to demand
<https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-63-african-debt-crisis/>
‘conditionalities’ from debt-ridden countries while forbidding China from
negotiating when it lends money.

Interestingly, the final statement
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/05/20/g7-leaders-statement-on-economic-resilience-and-economic-security/>
from the G7 did not mention China by name, but merely echoed the concern
about ‘economic coercion’. The phrase ‘all countries’ and not China,
specifically, signals a lack of unity within the group. European Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen, for instance, used her speech
<https://www.politico.eu/article/von-der-leyen-nudges-biden-on-subsidies-at-g7-summit/>
at the G7 to put the US on notice for its use of industrial subsidies: ‘We
need to provide a clear, predictable business environment to our clean tech
industries. The starting point is transparency among the G7 on how we
support manufacturing’.

One complaint
<https://www.cgdev.org/publication/how-china-lends-rare-look-into-100-debt-contracts-foreign-governments>
from Western governments and think tanks alike has been that Chinese
development loans contain ‘no Paris Club’ clauses. The Paris Club is a body
of official bilateral creditors that was set up in 1956 to provide
financing to poor countries who have been vetted by IMF processes,
stipulating that they must pledge to conduct a range of political and
economic reforms in order to secure any funds. In recent years, the amount
of loans given through the Paris Club has declined, although the body’s
influence and the esteem its strict rules garner remain. Many Chinese loans
– particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative – refuse to adopt Paris
Club clauses, since, as Professor Huang Meibo and Niu Dongfang argue
<https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202107/1229605.shtml>, it would sneak
IMF-Paris Club conditionalities into loan agreements. ‘All countries’, they
write, ‘should respect the right of other countries to make their own
choices, instead of taking the rules of the Paris Club as universal norms
that must be observed by all’. The allegation of ‘economic coercion’ does
not hold if the evidence points to Chinese lenders refusing to impose Paris
Club clauses.

G7 leaders stand before the cameras pretending to be world representatives
whose views are the views of all of humanity. Remarkably, G7 countries only
contain 10 per cent of the world’s population while their combined Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) is merely 27 per cent
<https://www.worldeconomics.com/Regions/G7/> of global GDP. These are
demographically and increasingly economically marginalised states that want
to use their authority, partly derived from their military power
<https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2023/world-military-expenditure-reaches-new-record-high-european-spending-surges>,
to control the world order. Such a small section of the human population
should not be allowed to speak for all of us, since their experiences and
interests are neither universal nor can they be trusted to set aside their
own parochial goals in favour of humanity’s needs.

Indeed, the agenda of the G7 was plainly laid out at its origin, first as
the Library Group in March 1973 and then at the first G7 summit in France
in November 1975. The Library Group was created by US Treasury Secretary
George Schultz, who brought together finance ministers from France (Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing), West Germany (Helmut Schmidt), and the UK (Anthony
Barber) to hold private consultations among the Atlantic allies. At the
Château de Rambouillet in 1975, the G7 met in the context of the ‘oil
weapon’ wielded by the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC) in 1973 and the passage of the New International Economic Order
<https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-regionalism-new-international-order/>
(NIEO) in the United Nations in 1974. Schmidt, who was appointed German
chancellor a year after the Library Group’s formation, reflected
<https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2292-the-poorer-nations> on
these developments: ‘It is desirable to explicitly state, for public
opinion, that the present world recession is not a particularly favourable
occasion to work out a new economic order along the lines of certain UN
documents’. Schmidt wanted to end ‘international *dirigisme*’ and states’
ability to exercise their economic sovereignty.

The NIEO had to be stopped in its tracks, Schmidt said, because to leave
decisions about the world economy ‘to officials somewhere in Africa or some
Asian capital is not a good idea’. Rather than allow African and Asian
leaders a say in important global matters, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson
suggested that it would be better for serious decisions to be made by ‘the
sort of people sitting around this table’.

The private attitudes displayed by Schmidt and Wilson continue to this day,
despite dramatic changes in the world order. In the first decade of the
2000s, the US – which had begun to see itself as an unrivalled world power
– overreached militarily in its War on Terror and economically with its
unregulated banking system. The war on Iraq (2003) and the credit crunch
(2007) threatened the vitality of the US-managed world order. During the
darkest days of the credit crisis, G8 states, which then included Russia,
asked surplus-holding countries of the Global South (particularly, China,
India, and Indonesia) to come to their aid. In January 2008, at a meeting
in New Delhi (India), French President Nicolas Sarkozy told
<https://socialistproject.ca/2010/06/b375/> business leaders, ‘At the G8
summit, eight countries meet for two and a half days and on the third day
invite five developing nations – Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South
Africa – for discussions over lunch. This is [an] injustice to [the] 2.5
billion inhabitants of these nations. Why this third-grade treatment to
them? I want that the next G8 summit be converted into a G13 summit’.

There was talk during this period of weakness in the West that the G7 would
be shut down and that the G20, which held its first summit in 2008 in
Washington, D.C., would become its successor. Sarkozy’s statements in Delhi
made headlines, but not policy. In a more private – and truthful –
assessment in October 2010, former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard told
<https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WL0510/S00015/cablegate-ambassadors-meeting-with-michel-rocard.htm>
US Ambassador to France Craig R. Stapleton, ‘We need a vehicle where we can
find solutions for these challenges [the growth of China and India]
together – so when these monsters arrive in 10 years, we will be able to
deal with them’.

The ‘monsters’ are now at the gate, and the US has assembled its available
economic, diplomatic, and military arsenals, including the G7, to suffocate
them. The G7 is an undemocratic body that uses its historical power to
impose its narrow interests on a world that is in the grip of a range of
more pressing dilemmas. It is time to shut down the G7, or at least prevent
it from enforcing its will on the international order.

In his radio address on 9 August 1945, US President Harry Truman said
<https://www.pbs.org/perilousfight/psychology/the_atomic_option/letters/>:
‘The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a
military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid,
insofar as possible, the killing of civilians’. In reality, Hiroshima was
not a ‘military base’: it was what US Secretary of War Henry Stimson called
a ‘virgin target’, a place that had escaped the US firebombing of Japan so
that it could be a worthwhile testing ground for the atomic bomb. In his
diary <http://www.doug-long.com/stimson5.htm>, Stimson recorded a
conversation with Truman in June about the reasoning behind targeting this
city. When he told Truman that he was ‘a little fearful that before we
could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out
that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to
show its strength’, the president ‘laughed and said he understood’.

Two-year-old Sadako Sasaki was one of 350,000 people living in Hiroshima at
the time of the bombings. She died ten years later from cancers associated
with radiation exposure from the bomb. The Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet was
moved by her story and wrote a poem against war and confrontation. Hikmet’s
words should be a warning even now to Biden for laughing at the possibility
of renewed military conflict against China:

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead.

I’m only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I’m seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow.

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind.

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead.

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play.
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