G7 meetings (between the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan) are no longer what they were, just as NATO did in the security and strategic spheres.
The overarching problem is that the world has entered a period of militarization and violence. The “fifth Gaza war” has converged with the “fourth Gulf war” in one package of states and militias, while the war in Ukraine looms over both wars in the Middle East, where Europe’s pursuits diverge from those of the United States.
The G7 Summit in France comes amid a global crisis of three dimensions: geopolitical, geoeconomic, and geostrategic. The first dimension includes a bitter history revolving around the Arab and Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its extensions into Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq; and the Arab-Iranian conflict, which stretched into the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
These conflicts deepened with the rise of Islamic and Jewish religious fundamentalism, and with their armament, which has taken new horizons through cyber technology and aerial and naval drones.
Second, the economic dimension also arose from the imbalance between Iran on one side, and the United States and Israel on the other. Iran was compelled to provoke a global economic crisis by blocking nearly 20 percent of the world’s oil, hitting energy, food, supply chains, and industry in general.
The third, strategic dimension was summed up by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to global navigation in a war with a country that has nuclear arms. The G7 summit has a lot on its plate.
Geopolitics is a school of political science and international relations that imposes determinisms that are difficult to escape. Just as human beings do not choose their parents, states do not choose their neighbors. With neighbors, proximity can make fences either thin yet capable of keeping enemies, insects, unwanted creatures, and thieves away, or it can allow for the exchange of gifts on holidays and wedding occasions. It can be a path to conflict and hostility, or to cooperation and interdependence.
The Arab world’s neighbors: Iran, Türkiye, and Israel create “geopolitical” dilemmas that require securing the interests of all parties. Historically, this has not happened. Hostility has continued to accumulate one war after another, making talk of peace difficult amid the killing and destruction.
The occasion of the G7 meeting seems astonishing amid the major collapse in the influence of international organizations and international law in general, or of the post-Second World War United Nations system, a kind of old world that appeared bright during the age of globalization but is now witnessing another world in which international institutions have fallen apart.
In our region, which presses itself upon every international forum, many actors exploit conflicts and distorted geopolitical conditions. These include multiple elements known as “spoilers.” The various militias, from Hezbollah to the Popular Mobilization Forces, Hamas, and the Houthis, are the products of countries whose identities remain incomplete, still confused about how to define themselves, their borders, and their identities, and unprepared to cross the difficult road toward the nation-state.
They are better armed than national armies, and they represent the obstructing third in the activity of the state. The presence of this type of spoiler makes the war burning in the Arab Gulf resistant to being steered toward peace, or toward reorganizing the world instead of destroying it.
Although the United States leads the G7 by virtue of its enormous gross domestic product, $32 trillion, and by virtue of its ownership and control of the dollar as a global currency, as well as its major control over the movement of money and investment around the world, US President Donald Trump, since the beginning of his second presidential term, has changed the way he deals with relations with allies in Europe, Asia, and South America, especially regarding ties with Canada, Mexico, and Greenland, all the way to waging war on Iran in alliance with Israel.
After 100 days of fighting, negotiations, and intermittent and continuous strikes, the fate of the global economy (which the G7 is supposed to protect from destruction) finds the group with little to offer except perhaps to invite everyone to attend a banquet from which neither China nor India nor several Arab states are excluded. The city of Evian, where the G7 summit was held, was very far indeed from the Strait of Hormuz.
