G7 foreign ministers gather near Paris

The setting was an abbey rather than a ministry: stone cloisters in the Yvelines, outside Paris, where the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven gathered on 26 and 27 March for the first formal meeting of the French presidency. Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s Europe and foreign minister, hosted his counterparts from Germany, Canada, the United States, Italy, Japan and Britain, alongside the European Union’s high representative, two and a half months before the Evian summit that will crown the year’s chairmanship. The venue was deliberate. At a moment when the international order is fragmenting, France has cast its presidency as a space of dialogue among the world’s large economies rather than the usual empty declaration.

The agenda was the familiar catalogue of trouble, and the sticking points were named rather than skirted. Ministers discussed Iran and the wider Middle East, Sudan, Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti, and endorsed a statement on Iran that called for the protection of civilians and of civilian energy infrastructure. Barrot then sat down across the table from his Ukrainian counterpart and chaired a session on continued G7 support for Ukraine, an item the French presidency has placed near the top of its list. On reconstruction, the club committed to back an international fundraiser for the containment enclosure at Chernobyl, badly damaged by a Russian strike in 2025, and to host a conference on Captagon, the synthetic pill that has warped parts of the Middle East and is now reaching European markets.

What set this meeting apart from the usual closed-door round was the guest list. Alongside the seven, the foreign ministers of India, Brazil, South Korea and Saudi Arabia took part in a session on reforming global governance, reconstruction and the shared threats of narcotics trafficking and organized crime, with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the room. The message is that the G7 no longer pretends it can settle the world’s problems in private. It now chooses, selectively, to widen the table and then to describe, in a published communique, exactly what the wider table was for.

The practical outputs were modest but concrete. A task force between G7 members is building a network of ports and tools to interdict maritime drug flows. The presidency will organize a regional conference in the Caribbean to deepen the fight against trafficking. Partners agreed to keep working to secure critical-mineral supply chains, and they began a conversation about folding migration into the prevention and resolution of conflicts. The French also floated the outlines of a regional reconstruction and development bank for the Middle East, an idea that will need a great deal more substance before it is a bank at all.

None of this single meeting changes a war, unlocks a border or rewrites a tariff. The statements are short, the money is undecided, and reconstruction in a war zone is a project measured in years, not communiques. Yet the act of showing up at an abbey, agreeing a one-page line on civilians and civilian power, and inviting four large emerging economies into the room is itself the product. At a moment when grand alliances are fraying and every minister seems to speak from a different script, the value of the G7 may have narrowed. It has not vanished. What remains is the small, careful list of things that seven wealthy democracies can still agree to write down in the same document.