From G7 to D10: Why the world's democracies should finally name their coalition

This is a month thick with summitry. India hosts the 18th BRICS summit in Delhi this weekend, featuring 11 major and middle powers, besides several aspiring partners. Earlier on Aug 31-Sep 1, the 26th SCO summit was held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The 81st session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in NYC has been underway since this week.

Amid the UNGA jamboree, the most watched event will be the 2nd of 4 'G2' meetings of the year - the Xi-Trump 'summit' in Washington scheduled for Sep 24, this time to carve up the AI cake. The other G2, Russia and China, keeps tightening its embrace with every meeting. In November, Apec meets in Shenzhen before G20 caps the calendar in Florida in December.

Also read: Why the G7 is worried about global economic imbalances


These groupings make for a crowded stage for what Ian Bremmer still calls a 'G-Zero' world. Each convening is, in effect, a competing script for primacy of nations, or ideas in the multipolar order. Rising non-Western powers carry proud letterheads. BRICS, for instance, command higher growth rates and larger purchasing-power GDP than G7 economies.

But amid all this, one grouping is conspicuous for having no name. Industrial democracies keep assembling informally, year after year, as though shy of admitting they form a coalition. That correction is overdue.

When G7 leaders gathered at Evian in France in June, the membership on paper was unchanged: the US, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the EU. But with the 7 were PMs of India and Australia, and president of South Korea, invited as they have been at nearly every recent summit. The forum still calls itself G7, but it behaves like a D10, the world's 10 leading democracies.

The concept of G7 + Australia, India and South Korea took shape in the US state department's policy-planning staff around 2008, was adopted by Atlantic Council in 2014 to defend a rules-based democratic order, and came into view in 2020, when British PM Boris Johnson proposed pooling 10 democracies to break Huawei's grip on 5G. Together, they command roughly 60% of global GDP.

For three decades after the Cold War, the West wagered that drawing authoritarian powers into the liberal order would liberalise them. Russia was welcomed in 1998, briefly making G7 'G8'. China entered WTO in 2001. The bet failed, in no small part because of the West's own failings, now compounded by an internal wrecking ball named Trump.

As the US unipolar moment ended around 2008, China grew richer and more assertive without loosening its politics, launching BRI and racing ahead in critical tech. Russia pushed back against US overreach in Georgia in 2008, seized Crimea in 2014, and was expelled, returning G8 to G7.

That same year, Atlantic Council opened its D10 Strategy Forum, an admission that where economic integration had failed, a 'coalition of values' might be needed. The pandemic sharpened the point in 2020, exposing how far Western supply chains had come to rest on a single authoritarian workshop. Russia's war on Ukraine in 2022 strengthened the West's case for democratic solidarity.

Each shock nudged G7's agenda towards D10. By the Hiroshima G7 Summit in 2023, leaders were debating supply-chain resilience, economic coercion and emerging technologies. At Kananaskis, Canada, in 2025, the grouping launched a critical minerals action plan and an AI-governance push, with India, Australia and South Korea in the room. The Evian agenda of 2026 - mineral supply chains, AI, economic governance, Ukraine - reads like a continuation.

India has now attended the G7 outreach for seven straight years, since 2019. Australia and South Korea join whenever Britain, Japan or Canada holds chair. When Narendra Modi and Anthony Albanese arrived at Kananaskis, every Quad member sat at a G7 table. Canada's Mark Carney defended the Modi invitation in plain strategic terms: India is a leading economy at the heart of global supply chains.

There's a catch. The drift towards D10 is driven by the G7's maritime, Indo-Pacific-facing members. Continental Europe remains wary. Germany in 2022 and Italy in 2024 invited India alone, leaving out Australia and South Korea, consistent with a long unease in Berlin, Rome and Paris about anything resembling an anti-China bloc.

The fear is that a formal D10 would harden the world into rival camps and complicate cooperation on problems that respect no ideology - climate, pandemics. And the US has become an unpredictable partner. Which is why D10, after more than a decade of advocacy, has never been launched.

Also read: PM Modi-Trump G7 meeting: Modi flags seafarers' safety; ties have 'new speed, new energy'

Yet, the multipolar world is arriving whether democracies name their coalition or not. This year's calendar of rival summits is proof. In a world where trade, tech and finance are increasingly turned into instruments of coercion, the answer is not fewer coalitions but clearer ones.

D10 wouldn't be anti-China or anti-Russia but a positive concert of the capable - 10 democracies that hold technologies, capital and supply chains on which a stable order depends. India has much to gain and offer. Seven summits running, it has become indispensable to G7 outreach. D10 would turn recurring courtesy into a standing seat.

The club of 7 has, summit by summit, begun to behave like a club of 10. It's time it said so, dissolved itself, and gave the arrangement the name its architects proposed a generation ago.

(The writer is former Indian high commissioner to Canada)