G7's secret identity: It's really D10

In a month filled with summitry, India has hosted the 18th BRICS summit in Delhi, the 26th SCO summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and the 81st session of the UN General Assembly in NYC. The spotlight is now on the G2 summit of China and Russia, set for September 24 in Washington to discuss the distribution of the AI market. The other G2, Russia and China, are increasingly closer with every meeting.

The G7 summit is a crowded stage for competing scripts of primacy in the multipolar order, with rising non-Western powers carrying proud letterheads. The G7, which includes the US, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the EU, is joined by the PMs of India, Australia and South Korea at most recent summits. Though the group still calls itself G7, its actions resemble those of a D10, the world's 10 leading democracies.

The concept of a D10, comprising the 10 leading democracies, was first proposed by the US State Department's policy-planning staff in 2008, adopted by the Atlantic Council in 2014 and made public in 2020. The D10 consists of roughly 60% of global GDP. After the end of the US unipolar moment, China grew richer and more assertive while Russia pushed back against US overreach in Georgia, seized Crimea and was expelled, returning G8 to G7.

The pandemic and Russia's war on Ukraine in 2022 have strengthened the West's case for democratic solidarity.

The G7's agenda has been shifting towards D10, with a focus on supply-chain resilience, economic coercion and emerging technologies. In 2023, leaders were debating these issues at the Hiroshima G7 Summit, and in 2025, a critical minerals action plan and AI-governance push were launched with India, Australia and South Korea in the room. The Evian agenda for 2026 includes mineral supply chains, AI, economic governance, and Ukraine.

India has been attending the G7 outreach for seven straight years, and Australia and South Korea have been joining whenever Britain, Japan or Canada holds chair. However, there are concerns that a formal D10 would harden the world into rival camps and complicate cooperation on problems that respect no ideology. Despite this, the multipolar world is arriving, and the D10, which has been advocated for over a decade, has never been launched.

The G7 has begun to behave more like a D10, and it's time for them to acknowledge this and give the arrangement the name its architects proposed a generation ago.