Analysis

G7 competes with Arab League and Xi'an summit

G7 leaders visit Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima Island in Hatsukaichi, western Japan, Friday, May 19, 2023. AP

Text by: Joris Zylberman Follow

2 min

The G7 faces competition from two other major international summits at the same time: the Arab League summit and the Xi'an summit. The Group of 7 is no longer as imposing as it used to be, a concrete expression of the multipolar world in which we live.

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There are days when the front page of the international press says everything at a quick glance. Read the headlines of Middle Eastern newspapers: everywhere, it is the Arab League that dominates, the brilliant end of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's international isolation. The G7 is relegated to the inside pages. The Middle East, led by Saudi Arabia, has chosen Syria's diplomatic reintegration alone. Forget the prohibitions of the West, which ostracizes a Syrian president because of his war crimes.

Read the official Chinese press now. The Global Times, for example. It mentions the G7 only marginally to praise "Xi Jinping's healthy and refreshing multilateralism with the six Central Asian leaders, in the face of the gutter policy poured out by the Group of 7 in Hiroshima". Beijing has taken care to organize its counter-summit in the manner of a multi-band billiards: the world economy is also in the hands of China, of its global project of the "newsilk roads", of which Central Asia is one of the key links. Xi Jinping unscrupulously disputes Russia's influence in the region.

Schism

Gone are the days when the G7 meetings were expected as the oracle of the global economy. Our world, still difficult to pin down, fractured by the war in Ukraine, has not been unipolar for twenty years. The absolute preponderance of Americans is a distant memory.

Some say this soon to be bipolar world, divided between Washington's allies and Beijing's growing circle of friends. A new schism of the international community where the Western bloc, since the G7 in Germany, wants to counter China on industrial investments, in semiconductors as in clean energies.

► Read also: The G7 meets in Hiroshima in the presence of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

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Read on on the same topics:

• Japan
• Saudi Arabia
• China
• G7
• Arab League