A world on fire makes compelling case for west's leaders to sit round G7 table

When the G7 meets in Canada today it will be the 51st gathering since its foundation. But there will be no polite applause from the gallery. Instead, it faces searching questions about its relevance in these turbulent and divided times, with war in Europe, the Middle East in flames, and the Oval Office occupied by someone openly disdainful of alliances and multilateralism.

- Kim Darroch

Ironically, the G7 summit was an American creation. It grew from a March 1973 meeting of finance ministers of the major western economies organised and hosted by the then US treasury secretary, George Shultz. Eighteen months later, the leaders of France, Germany, Japan and the US had all changed and the new American president, Gerald Ford, suggested that the new generation should meet in a "retreat", as much as anything to get to know one another. Hence the Rambouillet summit of November 1975, hosted by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and the launch of this 50-year journey.

G7 summits have long been criticised for wordy, widely unread communiques setting out lowest-common-denominator outcomes on too many subjects. But there have been moments when the G7 has made a genuine agenda-setting contribution, from the 1990s debt relief programme for the poorest countries to its response to the 2008 financial crisis. In 2014, it kicked Russia out of the by-then expanded G8 over its annexation of Crimea. Though this now sounds improbable given his break with the west, Putin valued G8 membership as a mark of Russia's status and enjoyed the meetings while he had personal friends around the table such as Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhard Schroeder.