March 21, 2020
Can the G7 Stop the Coronavirus?
The world’s leading governments are throwing all they have into the coronavirus fight. Recent days have seen dramatic social distancing requirements, novel border controls, massive central bank intervention and large fiscal stimulus plans. Missing, however, is meaningful multilateral cooperation to beat back the pandemic. Given the stakes, that’s a potentially deadly omission. Next week’s virtual G20 meeting represents an opportunity to correct it.
Multilateral groupings like the G7 and G20 are often dismissed as talk shops, producing little more than carefully-negotiated statements. And indeed, they can be. On Monday, G7 leaders met in an emergency session to coordinate their responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Despite pledging to do “whatever is necessary” to address the crisis, the leaders made no specific, time-bound commitments to actually doing so.
Read the full article in The National Interest.
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