“Conversing with a hang-glider rather than the French president, the German chancellor, or the British prime minister is just what “the leader of the free world” should get up to at a G–7 summit.”
“..If many of us have worried for some time that no one seems to be driving the bus, maybe we can take cold comfort now in the thought that not many seem to be on it..”
• “Falling Gently Away:” The G–7 in Italy (Patrick Lawrence)
That Group of 7 gathering on the coast of the Adriatic June 13–15 was truly a doozy, I have to say. Readers might think it a waste of column inches to devote any linage to it, as many will surely have forgotten about it by now—not to mention those many others who did not know of it in the first place and so could not get as far as forgetting it. But this just is my point: The seven people claiming to be the world’s most powerful assemble for a summit and it is not worth our attention? Say whaaa? The significance of this year’s G–7, I mean to say, lies in its insignificance. Considering the mess these very folk have made of the world, this bears consideration. Giorgia Meloni seems to have given some thought to the “non–” aspect of the event she hosted at the Borgo Egnazia, a resort hotel in the town of Savelletri di Fasano, “where the hills of the Itria Valley fall gently away to the Adriatic Sea.”
Prominent among the diversions the Italian premier arranged was a squad of hang-gliders who descended on the group, each trailing the flag of a G–7 member. Is this gravitas or what, 21st century statecraft at its most elevated—especially with a genocide, as supported by every one of these people, proceeding exactly 1,147 miles across the Mediterranean? The lasting image of the G–7 2024 summit has to be that viral video of President Biden wandering away from the others with, per usual at this point, the demeanor of a sleepwalker (which seems to me about right). No! the Democratic machine and its clerks in the media protested. That video was unfairly cut. Biden wasn’t drifting into nowhere: He went to talk to one of the hang-gliders as he, the hang-glider, packed up his harness and airframe. That changes everything. Conversing with a hang-glider rather than the French president, the German chancellor, or the British prime minister is just what “the leader of the free world” should get up to at a G–7 summit.
It was, of course, more worthwhile than talking to Justin Trudeau, I will give Biden this. One of the oddities of this year’s G–7, remarked upon here and there in the media coverage, is the low standing the seven had among their electorates. Axios had a wonderful headline on this, “World losers gather at G–7 summit.” Meloni was the enviable star, with a 40 percent approval rate, but Meloni was the odd one out: She has populist tendencies in a group of neoliberal authoritarians. Biden was second, with 37 percent, but this puts him behind Donald Trump in the American polls. The rest we can count among the walking wounded: Trudeau arrived at Savelletri with a 30 percent approval rate, Olaf Scholz with 25 percent, and then the hanging-by-fingernails group: Rishi Sunak (25 percent, about to be turned out of office), Emmanuel Macron (21 percent, tipped to lose in snap elections), Fumio Kishida (13 percent).
These people are by dint of the offices they hold the leaders of “the West.” If many of us have worried for some time that no one seems to be driving the bus, maybe we can take cold comfort now in the thought that not many seem to be on it. Can what remains of the West now fit into an Italian resort? I pose this as a serious question. Those ever-courteous but mercilessly direct Chinese went straight at this in their official comment on the summit. “The G–7 does not represent the world,” Lin Jian, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, remarked after the group issued its communiqué. Lin referred to the G–7’s share of global GDP: It is now roughly 10 percent and declining as the non–West’s rises. But, viewed from the Atlantic world’s perspective, it is just as significant, I would say, that those purporting to lead the West enjoy a similarly declining share of their population’s support.
The New York Times had an entertainingly contorted take on all this. Shared political weakness, along with high anxiety as the West’s major investments go bad—the proxy war in Ukraine, the Israelis’ savagery in Gaza, the attempt to isolate Russia—combined to make this year’s summit “unexpectedly smooth,” as Steve Erlanger wrote from Savelletri—“another example of unchallenged American leadership of the West.” Leave it to The Times, ever ready to find roses in the desert if it makes the imperium seem a good and welcome thing.
