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Analytical Studies > Analysis on the 2023 Hiroshima Summit
G7 Summits > 2023 Hiroshima Summit

The G7 Hiroshima Summit's Strong Performance

John Kirton, Director, G7 Research Group
May 22, 2023

The G7 leaders at their annual summit in Hiroshima, Japan, on May 19–21, 2023, have produced a strong performance, among the strongest ever that G7 summits have produced during the 49 years since their start in 1975. This strong performance is seen in Hiroshima's major achievements across most of the critical issues the leaders addressed, and across most key dimensions of governance that such summits perform (see Appendix A).

The summit's strong performance was led by very strong advances on its two top priorities of nuclear disarmament and the war in Ukraine, its strong advances on its next priorities of economic resilience and security, its significant advances on climate change, biodiversity, pollution and clean energy, and food security, and its substantial if shrunken advances on global health. Hiroshima's strong performance was reinforced and confirmed by the very high level of its private and public deliberations and its historically high decision making, its above-average domestic political management for its host, direction setting through affirmations of open democracy and human rights, the promising potential for delivering on its decisions, and the high institutional development of global governance inside and outside the G7.

Achievements

Day One: Friday, May 19

The Hiroshima Summit's exceptionally strong achievements started on the first day, Friday, May 19, with major advances on countering Russia's aggression against Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war and proliferation.

The first advance was the news that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky would come to Hiroshima in person, to participate in the sessions on Ukraine and security on the summit's final day, appearing not at the start but at the end of the summit. This gave the war in Ukraine twice as much attention as expected and made it a dominant theme throughout the summit from the very start to the very end. It meant that Zelensky felt sufficiently secure at home with the war going well enough that he could afford to travel halfway around the world to a country whose immediate neighbours were the countries that lay behind his Ukraine and the summit site in Japan – Russia and China itself. It also meant that G7 leaders could not allow him to return home with empty arms. At a minimum the Japanese host was more likely to change its long-standing policy of not exporting its arms to other countries, especially countries in conflict, thus joining its G7 partners to give Zelensky's Ukraine the arms that it so badly needed at a time when the inventories of the other G7 partners were running short. But the big question was whether Zelensky would fly home from the summit, metaphorically rather than materially, in an F-16 fighter jet with a well-trained Ukrainian pilot in the cockpit. The F-16 was the key piece of military equipment that he long said he needed to launch his liberation offensive this spring. The key component was training Ukrainian pilots on flying and fighting in F-16 jets, a process that could take several months. Once they were trained, the jets themselves could get into Ukraine within a day from neighbouring Poland and other nearby members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that used them. The training and F-16s were the only link missing to make the G7's professed full support for Ukraine a reality in the air and on the ground.

The second advance, announced in the late afternoon, was a G7 agreement to strengthen financial, other military and diplomatic support for Ukraine, and stop sanctions evasion, to further squeeze Russia's ability to continue its war. Here the G7 moved from sector-specific sanctions toward more comprehensive ones, and agreed that Russia's exports of its diamonds would be curtailed.

The third advance was historic action on nuclear disarmament. Helping Zelensky win the war quickly and liberate all of Ukraine was all the more important given Russian president Vladimir Putin's continuing suggestions that his armed forces could and would use Russian nuclear weapons in Ukraine in a desperate attempt to win his still badly failing "special military operation." The fact that his armed forces had just lost the long battle of Bakhmut meant that the temptation to use Russian nuclear weapons might loom larger in Putin's mind. It certainly meant that the danger of nuclear war had become a clear and present one rather than a distant memory from a long time ago when nuclear bombs were first used in war on the civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. That was why it was important that Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida had chosen his home town of Hiroshima as the site of the summit this year and started it by having all G7 leaders assemble together in the Hiroshima Peace Park to show their determination to dampen the nuclear threat and agree now to start working toward a world that would be free, not only of nuclear war, but of nuclear weapons themselves in the decades to come. Beyond the important pictures at the Hiroshima Peace Park and the fine statements of principle, at 10h30 came the release of the leaders' second, separate statement, the G7 Leaders' Hiroshima Vision on Nuclear Disarmament. It started with their "commitment to achieving a world without nuclear weapons," restated in subsequent passages, and endorsed Japan's Hiroshima Action Plan. The leaders affirmed "that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." They comprehensively addressed the current nuclear threat from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, pledged decisive measure counter them, covered the safety of civilian nuclear reactors, noted the value of nuclear technology for medicine and clean energy, and promised continuing support for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Day 2: Saturday, May 20

Advances continued on the summit's second day, Saturday May 20, at a somewhat lower level, as the G7 started acting in its new fields of economic resilience and economic security and defined a clean energy economy action plan. The summit issued two separate statements on these subjects in the early afternoon.

The G7 Leaders Statement on Economic Resilience and Economic Security pledged to diversify G7 members' supply chains, "including by supporting a more significant role for low and middle income countries in supply chains." Leaders promised to implement the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, and specified critical minerals, semiconductors and batteries. They promised to protect their critical digital infrastructure, launched the Coordination Platform on Economic Coercion and reaffirmed their collaboration through the Framework for G7 Collaboration on Digital Technical Standards.

On global health the Hiroshima Summit produced a substantial if shrunken performance. There was no separate statement on health, unlike on the five subjects of Ukraine, nuclear disarmament, the economy, clean energy and food. Health was dealt with only in the G7 Hiroshima Leaders Communiqué, which listed it in 14th place in the preamble. The communiqué addressed it only midway through the 66 paragraphs. It received three paragraphs (paras. 33–35), fewer than most of the preceding subjects.

The health section began on a properly strong note, focusing on strengthening the global health architecture with the World Health Organization at its core for future public health emergencies. Leaders then committed to "more coordinated and sustained leader-level governance … strengthening the leading role of WHO." It then applauded the decision to raise the share of the WHO's base budget to 50%, but made no promise to help do this. Nor did the G7 mobilize new money of its own for the needs it recognized for low- and middle-income countries' pandemic response. Repeated references to the "post COVID-19 era" or "conditions" suggested that the G7 did not recognize the many still dying from this disease within and beyond its members.

The G7's most ambitious and new commitment was to "reverse the first global decline in life expectancy in more than seven decades" with specific component targets and timetables, including reducing maternal, newborn and child mortality to return survival rates to "better than pre-pandemic levels" consistent with "the full range of SDG targets and indicators related to UHC." Another important advance was announcing the G7 Hiroshima Vision for Equitable Access to Medical Countermeasures and launching the MCM Delivery Partnership.

Far more surprising and disappointing was the tiny treatment of antimicrobial resistance, the climate-health link, mental health, and the health of the aged and their brain health, especially dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The several commitments on brain health just made by G7 health ministers at their meeting in Nagasaki on May 14 had been swiftly reduced by their leaders to only one: "We remain committed to promoting policies and resources to care for people living with dementia and welcome the development of potentially disease modifying therapies for the various types of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease."

Dimensions of Performance

Domestic Political Management

All G7 members and guest leaders attended in person, despite some suggestion a few days before that US president Joe Biden would have to stay home to deal with a looming debt deadlock and thus crisis there. On the summit's first day, Zelensky was added to an already star-studded cast.

Media attention and approval were strong on May 17–18 in the Japanese elite newspapers, providing a further boost for Kishida, who left open the possibility of calling a snap election soon.

The outcome documents contained 17 communiqué compliments to six members. Those compliments went to Japan with six, France with four, the United States with three, the European Union with two, and the United Kingdom and Germany with one each.

Deliberation

Private Conversation

Leaders' private conversations were expanded in several ways. The first was the large number of long duration ceremonial events on all three days of the summit, which offered many occasions for informal unscripted conversations among them.

Public Conclusions

Public deliberations, recorded in leaders' collective communiqué conclusions, were strong. The summit issued five separate statements, plus the very lengthy, traditional communiqué.

The separate statements started with two released on the opening day. The G7 Leaders' Statement on Ukraine contained 2,735 words in 27 paragraphs.

The second, the G7 Leaders' Hiroshima Vision on Nuclear Disarmament, contained 1,739 words in 11 paragraphs. It was the first ever G7 leaders document to focus on nuclear disarmament.

The third statement, the G7 Leaders Statement on Economic Resilience and Economic Security, issued in the early afternoon of May 20, contained 1,623 words in 19 paragraphs.

The fourth statement, the G7 Clean Energy Economy Action Plan, also issued in the early afternoon of May 20, contained 2,201 words in 16 paragraphs.

The fifth statement, the Hiroshima Action Statement for Resilient Global Food Security, issued in the evening of May 20, contained 2,674 words in 16 paragraphs.

The G7 Hiroshima Leaders' Communiqué itself, issued early for the first time in G7 summit history, in late afternoon on May 20 before the last day of the summit, contained 19,078 words in 133 long paragraphs and 40 pages.

Together the six outcome documents contained 30,046 words. This was the highest during the last 14 summits, since the 31,167 words at the L'Aquila Summit in 2009. It was the fourth highest in the 49 years of G7 summitry, following also the 30,695 words in at St. Petersburg in 2006, and the all-time high of 38,517 at Sea Island in 2004. It was over double the average of the 48 summits from 1975 to 2022.

Direction Setting

The six documents affirmed the G7's first distinctive foundational principle of open democracy 19 times. It affirmed the second such principle of human rights 38 times, to give 57 affirmations in all.

Decision Making

Decision making, measured through the production of collective, precise, future oriented, politically obligatory commitments, was very strong. Together the six outcome documents contained 698 commitments. This was the highest ever among all G7 summits since 1975, and much higher than the previous peak of 547 commitments at the Elmau Summit in 2022.

The G7 Hiroshima Leaders' Communiqué itself contained 415 commitments.

The five other statements contained a total of 283 commitments, as follows:

• G7 Leaders' Statement on Ukraine: 67 commitments
• G7 Leaders' Vision on Nuclear Disarmament: 13 commitments
• G7 Leaders' Statement on Economic Resilience and Economic Security: 39 commitments
• G7 Clean Energy Economy Action Plan: 79 commitments
• Hiroshima Action Statement for Resilient Global Food Security: 85 commitments.

The commitments covered 34 subjects categorized by the section and document titles in the documents (see Appendix B). They were led by the clean energy economy with 102 commitments, followed by food security with 98; Ukraine with 68; economic resilience and security with 60; economy, finance and sustainable development with 41 and the environment also with 41; climate change with 37; and health with 30. Then came energy with 23; gender with 21; terrorism, extremism, and crime and corruption with 20; digital with 18; nuclear disarmament and labour with 17 each; and refugees and migration with 15.

References

Kirton, John and Julia Kulik (2023). "A Very Strong Start to the G7 Hiroshima Summit," G7 Research Group, May 19. https://www.g7.utoronto.ca/evaluations/2023hiroshima/kirton-kulik-ukraine.html.

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Appendix A: G7 Summit Performance, 1975–2023 ↩

Notes:
Grade: Kirton scale is A+ = extremely strong, striking, standout, historic; A = very strong; A− = strong; B+ = significant; B = substantial; B− = solid; C = small; D = very small; F = failure (including made things worse).

Domestic political management: # communiqué compliments = the number of favourable references to G7/8 members by name. Spread = number of G7/8 members complimented.

Deliberation: # days = the duration of the summit; # statements = number of official statements issued in the leaders' name; # words = number of words contained in the official statements.

Direction setting: # affirmations of G7/8 core values of open democracy, individual liberty and human rights contained in official documents.

Decision making: # commitments contained in the official documents as identified by the G7 Research Group.

Delivery: Compliance with selected commitments assessed as follows: 1975–1989 assessed by George von Furstenberg and Joseph Daniels; 1990–1995 assessed by Ella Kokotsis; 1996–present assessed by the G7 Research Group. # commitments: number of commitments assessed. Compliance score for Hiroshima 2023 is from the preliminary final compliance report.

Development of global governance: # ministerials created = number of institutions created at the ministerial level; # official-level groups created = number of institutions created at the officials' level. Institutions are created at or by the summit, or during the hosting year, at least in the form of having one meeting take place.

Participation: # members = number of leaders of full members, including those representing the European Community from the start; Russia started as a participant in 1991 and became a full member in 1998, and stopped participating in 2014; the G4 met in 1974 without Japan and Italy and later that year the G6 (without Canada) met. # participating countries = number of full members plus number of leaders from other countries. # participating international organizations = number of heads of international organizations.

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Appendix B:Commitments by Communiqué-Defined Subject↩

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