NOTE: Activists from the US who traveled to Japan for the counter summit and protests were detained and deported. They report back on what happened in this press conference.
We congratulate all the members of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) and the International Peoples Front, for the Peoples’ Summit to Counter G7 in Kyoto, Japan and accompanying solidarity Global Days of Action held in several countries May 18-20, 2023.
Leaders of the G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as the European Union, met in Hiroshima this past weekend.
The G7 sought to make the Hiroshima Summit a platform for the US drive against its rivals China and Russia. Moscow dismissed it as a “propaganda show” while Beijing protested Japan’s “smear” and the UK’s “slander”. At the G7 sideline, the US met its Quad partners Japan, Australia and India for its so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy.
Commentators have previously called the G7 a “selfie summit” while others criticize it for falling short on promises. While the Summit pays lip service to a “free and open world” based on the rule of law, it was the US and its allies who make their own rules. While there are calls for disarmament, the G7 is on a war path.
The latest report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs shows that the post-9/11 US-led War on Terror may have caused at least 4.5 million deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
Within the G7, differences are merely papered over. As they cannot completely decouple from China, they just agree on “de-risking” their China relations. In fact, the China led BRICS group of countries has already overtaken the G7 in terms of global GDP.
The EU’s ‘Global Gateway’ and the G7’s own ‘Build Back Better World’ (B3W) competing funding schemes never took off. China’s trade with the EU and the US has dwindled by as much a third in the past months. On the other hand, China’s trade with partners in the Belt and Road Initiative is growing as well as with China’s Overseas Direct Investment (ODI)
Taiwan’s trade with China is three times larger than with the US. But arms sales of the US to Taiwan is close to US$10 billion in the past three years, while Taiwanese people by far see themselves as part of China, along with most of the world.
While G7 leaders met, the 22 members of the Arab League was hosted by Saudi Arabia, and the first China-Central Asia Summit was held in Xian. Major global regions, including Africa and Latin America are no longer the realm of their old colonial empires.
The G7 Summit has become a relic of the past. The US and its allies are desperate to hold on to its imperialist hegemony despite the reality of a global economic and environmental crisis that cannot be resolved whilst imperialism exists, growing global military conflicts and people’s resistance right across the globe, including in the home of U.S. imperialism itself.
It is imperative for the peoples of the world to remain ever vigilant against the US and G7 war provocations. The people can stop the wars by fighting back imperialism.