(EDM) This year’s G7 summit, held in Quebec, Canada, on June 8–9, was overcome by seemingly unprecedented controversies even before United States President Donald Trump suggested bringing Russia back into this elite club of the world’s largest liberal-democratic economies. Only the newly appointed Italian Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte may have found this idea worth contemplating (see EDM, June 6). The other five members did not even bother marshalling arguments against this impromptu proposal, because it is too obvious that Russia, with its authoritarian rule and aggressive behavior, cannot possibly belong to this group of democratic states (Newsru.com, June 8). Moscow was invited into the G7 in 1997, but was suspended from participation in the reformatted G8 in 2014, after its invasion of Ukraine. The list of candidates for the G7’s theoretical enlargement could perhaps include Australia, South Korea or India, but the prime minister of the latter was actually busy attending the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), in Qingdao, China. This club used to bring together Russia, China, and four Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). Last year, however, India and Pakistan were admitted as full members, while Iran remains an observer. […]
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