By Alfredo García Almeida*
The G-7 summit began last Thursday in Hiroshima, with the aim of strengthening diplomatic alliances around the "rule of law" and "territorial integrity", in the context of the growing global polarization over the hybrid war waged by the U.S. against Russia on the territory of Ukraine.
The G-7 was founded in March 1973, at the request of US Treasury Secretary George Shultz, by the finance ministers of West Germany, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Japan. Italy joined in 1975 and Canada in 1977. The G-7 represents the richest countries on the planet, about 58 % of the world's net wealth and more than 46 % of the world (GDP).
However, since 2014, the Atlantic Council, a think tank member of NATO, based in Washington D.C., founded in 1961 with the mission to encourage the continuation of cooperation between North America and Europe initiated at the end of World War II, has held the "D-10 Strategy Forum", considered as an alternative to the G-7, where the "leading democracies" that support a "rules-based democratic order", (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus the European Council and the European Commission) participate. While Spain, India, Indonesia and Poland are observer members. In other words, the G-7 is the main bloc of Western powers in the current confrontation against Russia and China.
According to Daniel Morales Ruvalcaba, Associate Professor at Sun Yat-sen University, China: "The G7 can be defined as an alliance made up of a select group of states, with a similar structural positioning, resulting from the coincidence in their national capacities, without ideological barriers, with a willingness to coordinate their policies towards the achievement of common objectives and the will to establish some technical means of cooperation".
Japan, the only non-Western country in the G-7 as host of the summit, selected a Japanese city victim of an atomic bombing launched by the US during World War II, which left 140,000 civilians dead, to fuel Washington's conflict with Moscow and Beijing. The special guest at the summit is the Ukrainian President, Volodimir Zelensky.
It was reported that the Japanese Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, promoted the participation in the meeting of South Korea, India, the Cook Islands, the Comoros, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia and Brazil, as well as the main neo-liberal international organizations, an act considered by experts to strengthen the political-military bloc led by Washington.
The military defeat of Japan and the occupation of its territory by the US, which undisguisedly continues to this day (18,000 soldiers), imposed on Tokyo a pacifist Constitution in 1946 that is coming to an end, due to Japan's growing involvement in Washington's conflict with Beijing. The Japanese government approved the largest ever defense budget increase, 2% of its GDP to be reached by 2027, a quota imposed by NATO on its European members, while it is negotiating to host the first liaison office of the Atlantic Alliance in Asian territory.
