The G-7, whose summit took place this weekend in French Biarritz, showed a simple and rather sad truth: the times when the most developed liberal economies in the world decided something in global politics are over.

If you believe the European media, the main stumbling block at the summit was the question of returning to the "seven" of Russia. This idea was expressed and actively promoted by US President Donald Trump, but leaders of other G7 countries, especially Great Britain and Canada, did not really like it. The unbending and irremovable Bundescan Chancellor Merkel spoke out in the sense that for Russia to return to the G7 table, "progress in the implementation of the Minsk agreements" is needed.

The EU, represented by the namesake of the American leader Donald Tusk, put forward the bold idea that instead of Russia, the president of “independent Ukraine” Zelensky should be invited to the next meeting of the “seven” to support “young democracy”. Trump was supported only by Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who by and large has nothing to lose - he is about to resign amid a government crisis erupting in the country.

“According to diplomats attending the Biarritz summit, Donald Trump fell out with the G7 leaders, demanding that Russia return to the group and rejecting their argument that the Seven should remain a meeting of liberal democracies,” The Guardian reports.

During dinner on the seashore (food for the summit participants was prepared by the owner of only one Michelin star, Cedric Beshad - and this, to put it mildly, is strange, given that there are ten Michelin three-star restaurants in Paris alone) a heated discussion flared up, and the audience present the diplomat told the influential business portal Quartz.com that “the evening was stressful: most other leaders insisted that the“ seven ”is a family, a club, a community of liberal democracies, and for this reason, one should not be allowed to preside NTA Putin that it does not meet. "

Trump, however, stood his ground. When the journalists after the summit asked him if he supported the “agreed position” of the leaders of the “seven” about the untimely return of Russia to the club, he said that such a decision had not been made. And since the next G7 summit will be held in the USA in 2020, it is up to him, Trump, to decide who should be invited there. This, of course, is nothing but a veiled signal to the anti-Russian-minded leaders of the "seven": the owner of the White House will act as he sees fit, without taking into account their liberal bleating.

"A new world mess - Trump caused confusion at the G7 summit," says the hostile MSNBC channel for the president.

And the reputable Politico website depicts a meeting of the G-7 leaders with a sort of “Schrodinger Summit,” about which nothing can be said for certain. “The leaders of the G7 club of rich democracies gathered in French Biarritz this weekend agreed that Russia should not be invited back to its ranks. Or maybe they didn’t do it, ”Politico sneers.

And the issue is not only the problem of Russia’s returning to the Seven table (which automatically turns it into the Eight). The same fog of uncertainty envelops the problem of Iran, which also rose at the summit.

The host of the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron, specifically invited Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to Biarritz, clearly hoping to act as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran. However, Donald Trump did not want to meet with Zarif. The White House owner told reporters that he knew everything Macron was doing and “approved it”, but considered that it was “too early” to meet with the Iranian Foreign Minister.

As a result, Zarif flew out of Biarritz without a sip, which did not prevent Macron from proudly declaring that the leaders of the "seven" reached an agreement on the Iranian issue. Discussions aimed at preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons and reducing tensions around Iran will continue, Macron said. What Trump reacted to in his usual manner: “We will pursue our own course, but we cannot forbid others to engage in propaganda. If they want to talk, let them talk. ”

At the same time, US officials in Biarritz say that the G-7 leaders agreed that the “maximum pressure” policy pursued by the Trump administration on Iran is working, and all of them support it.

But this is simply not true: Europeans are still ardent supporters of the B.Kh. Iranian nuclear deal. Obama is feverishly trying to find a way to save her from Trump's hawks.

“Obviously, no consensus was reached at the summit, even regarding a common goal,” an anonymous EU official quoted Politico as saying.

And this, it should be noted, is not the first time that the “seven” demonstrates not only the lack of common approaches, but also a deep split between the flagship of the West - the USA and their “faithful allies”. Last year, Donald Trump refused to sign the final communiqué of the summit, accusing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of lying and striving to "rob" American farmers. This time, the summit owner Emmanuel Macron invented an elegant move that seemed to him to avoid scandal: he announced that there would be no final communiqué at all. “However,” Politico observes, “Macron quickly discovered that the absence of a communiqué also means that there are no carefully agreed written reports on leaders’ agreements, no firm commitment to any particular action plan. ”

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And could it be otherwise if the G7 has not reflected the true state of affairs in global politics for a long time?

G7 is really a “family of liberal democracies”, only in the era of a total revision of liberal democracy that began in 2014-2016, this family becomes more and more like a “club of pique vests” discussing world politics with a cup of coffee on the terrace of a seaside restaurant ( in the case of Biarritz, it was so). Of course, Trump is absolutely right in asserting that the absence of Russia does not allow the Seven to seek effective solutions to the Iranian problem, the problems of Syria and North Korea.

But the Seven’s attempts to solve the problem of grandiose forest fires in the Amazon look just as ridiculous and even silly - after all, Brazil is also not part of the “family of liberal democracies”.

And the fact that G7 has Japan, but no China and South Korea, seriously hinders the "liberal democracies" to find ways out of the protracted trade war between Washington and Beijing. In general, the fact that the “seven” does not include China - the second, and in many respects the first economy in the world - says a lot about its “representativeness”.

G7 time has passed irrevocably. For several years now, the most pressing problems of world politics have been posed and partly even solved on the G20 platform, which includes not only the old "liberal democracies", but also China, Brazil, South Africa - and, of course, Russia. Against the background of this forum, the liberals from the "seven" puff their flabby cheeks from the last forces look unconvincing. And in this sense, today's statement by the press secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin Dmitry Peskov that "returning to the G8 format is not an end in itself for Russia" and that our country "does not intend to impose its participation" in this event sounds like a polite: " Thank you, you are somehow there without us. ”

And it is right.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.