“Stuck in the middle with you”: Should Australia join the D7?

Against the backdrop of an alphabet soup of leader summits producing hotly debated, but quickly forgotten, communiqués littered with platitudes, is there room for a new club of middle power democracies?

Former NATO secretary-general and ex-Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen thinks the time is ripe for some new diplomatic architecture.

Rasmussen has delivered a clarion call to protect democracy amid a ruptured rules-based international order and rampant democratic backsliding. At a recent summit in Copenhagen, he made the case for a new alliance, the Democracy 7 (D7), consisting of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea.

“The United States no longer has the will to lead,” the straight-talking Rasmussen told the Copenhagen Democracy Summit.

“The global policeman has gone rogue.”

Rasmussen argued that middle powers must unite and have each other’s backs, rather than bury their heads in the sand.

“My challenge today is to democratic middle powers, these countries are not hegemons like China and the United States, they still have the money, the muscle and the might to matter,” said Rasmussen, who envisions a lean and agile secretariat and potential meetings on the sidelines of existing leaders' summits.

The proposal puts flesh on the bones of a sentiment that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney expressed at Davos in late January, at a time when the US-Greenland crisis looked like it could destroy NATO.

“Middle powers must act together, because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu,” Carney said.

There is a lot of Sensible Susan substance to Rasmussen’s idea – a pro-free trade bloc that could also team up on critical minerals to counter Beijing’s supply chain dominance, as well as offer an investment alternative for the Global South to China’s Belt and Road.

He has also floated a potential economic equivalent to NATO’s Article 5 – that an attack on one is an attack on all.

“The Chinese strategy is to single out individual countries and expose those countries to economic coercion. But if we respond collectively, we represent 30% of the global economy, then it would create some respect,” Rasmussen said.

Economic coercion by global heavyweights toward middle powers has ramped up in recent years.

Exhibit A: Trump's tariff threats against the UK and his intimidation of the EU over Greenland.

Exhibit B: a China–Lithuania row over the name of a Taiwanese office in Vilnius and a bruising China–Canada trade stoush and hostage diplomacy espisode after Ottawa honoured its extradition treaty with the US and detained a Huawei executive.

Australia has also not been immune – when Scott Morrison’s government in 2020 called an inquiry into the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, China slapped an 80% restriction on Australian barley. Diplomatic bickering with Beijing also saw Australian winemakers and other producers punished.

A collective economic defence clause and support group could offer safety in numbers. (But it would need a fun nickname like the EU’s trade “bazooka”.)

The idea of a group of democracies acting as a steering committee of the free world has been kicking around for a few years. Former British prime minister Boris Johnson even experimented with expanding the G7 to a D10 (the G7 plus Australia, India and South Korea).

While some might question how effective a D7 could be sans the United States, it’s not the first time countries have had to grapple with a wayward Washington.

Remember how the Trump administration pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017? The sun still rose the next morning and the trade pact was eventually inked, albeit with a slightly clunkier name. Sure, it probably could have been much shinier with the Americans on board, but the lesson is – it’s possible to tell Uncle Sam: “You do you” while everyone else stays the course and reaps the rewards.

America’s democracy has clearly hit the skids. Is it a phase? Or are they permanently lost? Who knows?

But no matter how much one nostalgically binge-watches The West Wing and pines for the glory days of functioning adults in the White House, Trump still has more than 900 days left in office. The chaos shows no sign of abating.

Rasmussen, who has spent much of his career focused on transatlantic relations, still holds out some hope that normal programming might resume in the US one day and perhaps his D7 could become the D8.

But until that time, middle powers must find the courage to show an old friend some tough love.