This week provided an instructive juxtaposition of summits. In Italy, the United States and its Western allies convened the Group of Seven (G7) talking shop, while in Russia the BRICS nations held a workmanlike summit for their foreign ministers.

The G7 has become a shorthand term for elitist Western dominance over the world economy. On the other hand, the relatively new group known as BRICS can be seen as a progressive forum and voice for the global majority. While the former is shrivelling with irrelevance, the latter is steadily growing in importance for authentic international development.

There was a time when the U.S. and a clique of Western capitalist nations (including Japan) were viewed with respectability and an aura of global leadership. The heyday of Western economic and political power has waned in line with the systemic failing of U.S.-led capitalism as a model for the rest of the world to emulate. The presumed moral authority of these nations has also diminished as their reputation for hypocrisy and insufferable arrogance has burgeoned.

Indeed, the G7 has become a caricature of power. The United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan are seen as being ruled by self-serving extortionists, contributing little to global development. Their presumed superiority is untenable and looks ridiculous. The group represents a neocolonialist clique whose exploitation of finance and natural resources of other nations is an obscenity and shackle on the abundant potential for world development.

Now should be a time of diplomacy to bring the NATO proxy war madness in Ukraine to an end, as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and others are urging. But the warmongers of the U.S., EU, G7 and NATO have no such qualms about escalating the futile hostilities to a nuclear apocalypse.

Read more in this week’s Editorial

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