Against the breathtaking backdrop of Canada’s Rocky Mountains in Alberta, President Trump jolted the Kananaskis G-7 meeting with a bold and divisive proposal: expand the G7 to reinstate Russia and welcome China as members. This idea, presented as a somewhat inane gesture of pragmatic engagement, instead provoked strong opposition from world leaders, who condemned it as both strategically misguided and morally indefensible. While the debate over whether to engage or isolate adversarial states has long divided foreign policy circles, Trump’s call to welcome two authoritarian powers into an alliance of democracies risks undermining not only the G7’s moral authority but also the reason for its existence.
Why Russia Was Expelled—and Why It Should Stay Out
Russia’s exclusion from the G-8 in 2014 was not a bureaucratic oversight or political whim. It was a direct consequence and revulsion of its illegal annexation of Crimea and military intervention in Eastern Ukraine. That year, the planned Sochi summit was cancelled, and the group—then including Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper—chose to reconvene without Russia, formally reconstituting as the G7. Russia’s return was made contingent on adherence to international law, a condition the Kremlin has continued to disregard.
President Trump’s assertion that Russia’s exclusion “made them feel left out,” potentially provoking further aggression, inverts both logic and historical fact. It was not exclusion that prompted invasion—it was invasion that necessitated exclusion. Trump’s inaccurate attribution of Russia’s ouster to “Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau”—a factual error reported by multiple news outlets, as Justin Trudeau was not yet Prime Minister—only underscored the lack of diplomatic grounding in his proposal and at best, his poor memory. That memory also seems to omit the direct obligation the United States undertook in 1994 when Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal. In signing the Budapest Memorandum with the U.S., along with the U.K. and Russia, all guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for Kyiv relinquishing its third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. But today the G7’s consensus remains clear: Russia was removed due to its violations of sovereignty and international law, not out of spite. It is clear to the G-7 that reinstating Moscow without accountability would not deter further aggression—it would reward it.
War Crimes and the Cost of Normalization
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the global community has documented a harrowing list of atrocities: summary executions in Bucha, mass civilian graves in Mariupol and torture centres in Kherson. These were not isolated war crimes; they form part of a systematic campaign of brutality.
Ukrainian Attorney Oksana Matviychuk, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and head of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, has played a pivotal role in documenting these crimes and pursuing international justice. Her work—backed by the UN Human Rights Reports about Ukraine—reveals Russia’s ongoing disregard for the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Inviting Russia back into the G7 while such abuses persist would not only be diplomatically premature; it would amount to a moral capitulation.
Moreover, doing so would send a chilling message to survivors and victims: that justice is negotiable. It would erode the already fragile trust in international mechanisms designed to uphold human rights and prosecute war crimes. And for democracies seeking to defend a rules-based order, it would blur the line between accountability and acquiescence.
China: Economic Giant, Human Rights Pariah
Trump’s suggestion to include China in the G7 only heightened concerns. Though Beijing wields significant global influence, it does so through a governance model that is antithetical to the G7’s founding principles: a one-party authoritarian state that represses dissent, crushes free expression, and marginalizes ethnic and religious minorities.
Allegations of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience—particularly Falun Gong practitioners—have been substantiated by multiple investigations. The Kilgour-Matas Report (2006) and the Human Harvest documentary (2014) offer detailed evidence, supported by later public admissions from Chinese officials such as China’s Vice Health Minister Huang Jiefu who admitted in 2015 that organs were harvested from death row inmates—finally put an end to the practice. In 2019, an independent China Tribunal in London, chaired by former prosecutor Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, concluded that forced organ harvesting had occurred “on a significant scale.”
These actions, gained recognition in many circles as genocide under international law and raise significant ethical concerns that should disqualify China from participating in a forum based on democratic accountability.
Pragmatism or Appeasement?
President Trump framed his proposal as a strategy for peace through engagement, but critics argue that it represents appeasement disguised as diplomacy. Engagement must never come at the cost of principle. As the Council on Foreign Relations has noted, targeted sanctions and exclusion are crucial tools for upholding global norms and deterring impunity.
There is also a practical dimension to exclusion: alliances derive their strength from internal cohesion and shared values. Diluting those principles to accommodate authoritarian outliers invites dysfunction and ideological drift. History teaches us that appeasement rarely yields peace—it emboldens aggression.
The G7 is not merely a gathering of economic powers; it is not just about money and power; it represents a declaration of shared ethical values. Including states that reject those values sends a dangerous signal—that convenience outweighs accountability, and power overshadows principle.
What’s at Stake
If Trump’s proposal were to gain traction, the consequences would be severe. Ukraine’s ongoing cases at the International Criminal Court, including the kidnapping of Ukrainian children that has resulted in an arrest warrant issued for President Putin, could lose credibility if Russia is re-legitimized. Allowing China and Russia entry would strengthen other autocratic regimes, reducing the deterrent influence of democratic alliances. The G7 could very well encounter internal divisions, which could weaken its ability to tackle global crises like climate change, cybersecurity and fair trade.
Trump’s Sudden Kananaskis G-7 Departure
Before many of the world’s most serious problems could be discussed, Trump suddenly left the summit on its first evening, returning to Washington. But it needs to be said that Trump is not America, and even if he is not, America is still a democracy. Let us recall that Donald Trump, tried to overturn a lawful election, encouraged a violent mob to disrupt the transfer of power on January 6th, demanded loyalty from judges and officials over fidelity to the law, and labelled the press and political opposition as enemies. He has attacked American universities on dubious grounds. This conduct shows contempt for democratic norms.
Meanwhile America remains a democracy so long as it has a free press, its courts enforce the rule of law, its universities and most other institutions still honour the Constitution. These fundamental safeguards—an independent judiciary, protected speech, and electoral accountability—have thus far contained Trump’s authoritarian impulses and preserved democratic order despite repeated tests.
The G7’s Democratic Legacy
Founded in the 1970s as a coalition of leading democracies, the G7 represents more than just GDP. It embodies a commitment to civil liberties, free press, open societies, and the rule of law. Admitting states like Russia and China to the G-7 would fundamentally alter that identity. While strategic engagement with adversaries is a legitimate foreign policy tool, there is a difference between discussing matters across the table and granting those same adversaries a seat at it. One does not join with a Hitler, but seeks to restrict him. Therefore, until Russia ends its war and China demonstrates tangible human rights reform, their participation in the G7 should remain not only unwelcome—but unthinkable. Meanwhile, the Kananaskis G-7 meeting seriously needs to reconsider whether they want a “friend of Putin’s” to sit at their table as they discuss their security in a turbulent world.