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Ashley works with clients to bring strategy, structure, clarity and confidence to their global financial lives and keep it that way. ​In 2013, Ashley founded Arete Wealth Strategists, a fee-only financial planning and investment management firm for Australian/American expatriates.
June 16, 2025

The G7 Questions to be Answered

The annual Group of Seven (G7) summit is underway in Alberta, Canada, and this 50th meeting is likely to be the most acrimonious in history.  The original objective of bringing together leaders from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan every year was to make sure that countries which supported peace and free market global prosperity were on the same page with their trade and geopolitical allies.  The idea was that if these countries could continue to agree on the agenda that has brought unprecedented global prosperity since World War II, then no individual country would be able to significantly disrupt it.  Or dare.

This year, the G7 leaders invited representatives from the European Union, and political leaders from Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Ukraine, South Africa and South Korea to participate in identifying the world’s geopolitical challenges and facilitate a broader consensus on how to coordinate actions to tackle them.  

When these meetings were first organized, nobody could have predicted that the biggest challenge to this organized consensus would come from the United States.  It’s fair to say that the other participants disagree with America’s abrupt unilateral imposition of tariffs, or support for Russian aggression against Ukraine.  The 90-day pause on ‘reciprocal’ tariffs is still in effect (the deadline is July 9), but Canada is still having to pay a 25% tariff on automobiles and a 50% duty steel and aluminum imports into the U.S.  All of the other G7 participants are looking at triple digit tariffs starting in roughly three weeks.

The Trump Administration plans to use the meeting for face-to-face negotiations that would produce new tariff agreements, country by country, and also to urge the participants to ally themselves against China’s economic coercion.  The rest of the leaders would likely suggest that this kind of coordination—at the heart of why the G7 was formed in the first place—would be easier if the U.S. weren’t threatening crippling tariffs on its allies.

It’s possible that the expanded list of leaders will use the occasion to map out a strategy to counteract, not China, but the U.S.  It could become the G6+ uniting against what they regard as bullying economic tactics that fly in the face of the longstanding G7 consensus of economic peace and prosperity.  There are sure to be reality-TV-like soundbites coming out of the meeting, but the bigger issue is whether the U.S. can maintain its global leadership in an entirely new direction, or if its most loyal allies will decide to stay on their longstanding course in opposition.

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