US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida meeting Thursday, May 18, ahead of the Hiroshima G7/Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

May 18^th, 2023

The leaders of the G7 nations of Canada, the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and France — along with the usual ancillary institutions and observer states — are gathering in Hiroshima this weekend for a meeting framed in some quarters as less a Hiroshima, Mon Amour whirlwind love affair than a sort of geopolitical version of The Bachelor. This drama involves the world’s major industrialized democracies vying for the ardor of a group of other democracies as China and Russia lurk in the underbrush, waiting to seduce them with promises of infrastructure vanity projects, deceptively string-free debt relief and the heady lure of corruption-secured, purposefully disruptive, perpetual new-world-order power.

The implication is that this is a battle of major geopolitical players for the systemic adherence of smaller, regional geopolitical players, who are now facing the swoony conundrum of being courted by superpowers, wannabe superpowers, unipolar-adjacent, multipolar-aspirational actors of varying degrees of legitimacy, sincerity and curb appeal in a Manichean battle for world domination. Leaving aside the fact that such swoony conundrums never end well for the swooner, that basic game-show calculus defines the freshly formed conventional wisdom around this epic dating game.

Heading into Hiroshima, the most interesting part of the Venn diagram of pro-democracy vs. anti-democracy rosters is the overlap, where India and Brazil are still playing hard to get, notwithstanding the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that they’ve both spent the past decade in the hot tub with China.

Most recently, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — whose rise to national power seems to have been not so much despite his role in the 2002 Gujarat religious riots but on its strength as a new world order brutality audition — has been hounding opposition leader and Congress Party scion Rahul Gandhi toward prison to keep him out of next year’s election. Brazilian President Ignacio Lula da Silva has been making clear his affinity for President Xi Jinping at a time when “non-aligned” as a relationship status is beginning to sound like a euphemism for “It’s not you, it’s me”. South Africa, the BRICS member who isn’t Brazil, India, Russia or China, has also spent years engaged in an array of new world order foreplay in a terribly ironic rebuke to the democratic principles for which Nelson Mandela fought. President Cyril Ramaphosa was disinvited to Hiroshima and this week staged a righteously indignant denial after being accused of selling arms to Russia before employing the accusation as a narrative catalyst to justify running into the arms of Russia.

That pathocratic approach to power has essentially hacked the norms of leverage exercised in the conduct of geopolitical power dynamics, producing the Faustian bargained rogues’ gallery of bullies, chancers and con artists currently crashing the ranks of heads of state and government.

The misapprehension at the core of this narrative is that this is only a competition between countries, when it might be better understood as a war waged by interests. What is portrayed as a binary, systemic competition between autocracy and democracy began as a one-way war on democracy waged mostly covertly, based on the unprecedented operational possibilities unleashed by the fourth industrial revolution, over more than two decades. Its use of narrative warfare, propaganda, misinformation, misrepresentation, corruption and reality distortion broke into the public sphere with the 2016 presidential campaign and the careening, democracy-degrading preposterousness of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The interests waging it include borderless political, geopolitical and intelligence players, who share the view that the path to a certain kind of future would be much more pleasant and significantly simpler if democracy were not an obstacle and irritant to their exotic notions of progress. Its siege of the public sphere, of media, of politics and of wider democracy has been characterized by a Hobbesian fetish for human suffering and a tactical if not pathological disregard for truth, decency, compassion and the rule of law. This siege is not about seizing territory — Ukraine as the first explicitly new world order military adventure notwithstanding — it’s about accumulating power without having to, and its field of covert operations not only disregards borders but violates boundaries of all kinds: personal, legal, behavioural; of belief, of plausibility, of precedent and of taste. That pathocratic approach to power and its abuses has essentially hacked the norms of leverage exercised in the conduct of geopolitical power dynamics, producing the Faustian bargained rogues’ gallery of bullies, chancers and con artists currently crashing the ranks of heads of state and government.

On the other side of that borderless battle is not just “the West”, not just America and not just some abstract notion of democracy. On the other side of that battle is humanity; the people whose rights, freedoms, plans, work, thoughts, words and agency are protected by democracy, to the extent that they are still protected at all amid a global assault on all of the above whose front lines include: surveillance-state encroachments on human lives in China and across a range of datelines elsewhere in the world; the reversal of half a century of reproductive rights in America; attacks on voting rights, LGBTQ+ rights and other anti-authoritarian norms in America and elsewhere; the profit-driven eradication of work by technology; and the degradation of peace, order and good government in the UK, America and elsewhere through the daily deployment of strategic corruption and performative propaganda. Reversing that assault requires an equally borderless response against the operational infrastructure enabling this lunacy, meaning the redeployment of western intelligence capabilities — after a two-decade string of apparent failures that have immeasurably bolstered anti-democracy interests — to energetically defend democracy.

So, as the G7 leaders gather in Hiroshima, scene of one of history’s most dehumanizing acts, they’ll be representing not just a list of countries, but people around the world who whose own leaders have betrayed them for the power perks of authoritarian barbarity.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.