The case for South Korea to join the G7

For Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the establishment of the Group of Six in November 1975 sought to fulfil a core purpose: ‘to discuss problems that confronted the whole industrialised world’ between the United States, France, Italy, Japan, West Germany and the United Kingdom. Over time, this ‘anything-but-an-alliance’ has grown in number and scope. Membership has expanded to include Canada and Russia (the latter subsequently expelled in 2014), and the focus of annual summits has broadened beyond economic cooperation and crisis management.

Fifty-one years after the first summit at the Château de Rambouillet, the agenda for this year’s G7 summit, which took place at Évian-les-Bains, chaired by France’s Emmanuel Macron, was topped by the gargantuan question of geopolitics. Also on the list were the deliberately ambiguous talking points of peace in Ukraine and Europe, the ‘evolving situation in the Middle East’, the pursuit of ‘more balanced economic growth’, the future of artificial intelligence (AI), and ‘international partnerships and solidarity’. For all these vagaries, what cannot be denied is that the effects of any one of these issues certainly go beyond the forum’s seven members.

Yet, as the G7 enters its second half-century, the forum risks fading into irrelevance. Its global economic share is in decline, accounting for just over 43 per cent of global Gross Domestic Product in contrast to 65 per cent at the turn of the century. At a time when the Indo-Pacific is growing in importance as a simultaneous economic and geopolitical opportunity and arena of heightened global competition, the question of whether one Asian member (namely, Japan) of the G7 is enough becomes increasingly salient. With the principal threats to the rules-based international order coming from Moscow and Beijing, as both powers attempt to redefine the rules of international order in their favour, there is no better time than the present for the G7 to think about its future.

The G7 has not been immune from questions of membership. Year upon year, leaders of host states have invited diverse non-member states to annual summits amid a proliferation of calls for expansion. One repeat visitor has been South Korea. First invited to the cancelled summit in 2020 (owing to coronavirus), it is now time for the G7 to allow Seoul to become the group’s eighth member, as its self-styled pragmatic president, Lee Jae-myung, makes his first visit to Europe since taking office in June 2025.

It is not just South Korea’s commitment to freedom, peace, democracy, and prosperity that renders it suited to the forum. The land of the morning calm possesses an increasingly robust set of material capabilities. South Korea has already strengthened ties with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), becoming the second-largest exporter of arms to European NATO member states – whether tanks, Chunmoo rocket-launcher systems, or self-propelled howitzers – after the United States. With vigorous manufacturing in semiconductors, shipbuilding and steel, among other areas, it is no surprise that South Korea aims to become the world’s fourth-largest defence exporter by 2030. This May, Seoul pledged to launch its first nuclear-powered submarine within the next decade, a manoeuvre which will serve as a vital counterweight to North Korea’s escalating nuclear and missile capabilities.

In the economic domain, South Korea, the fourth-largest economy in Asia, is a natural partner for G7 members. Prior to this week, London and Seoul had pledged to strengthen their cooperation catalysed by the Downing Street Accord in November 2023, particularly with respect to critical minerals. In addition to free-trade agreements, which South Korea has established with all G7 members, Seoul’s strengths in AI technologies and semiconductors cannot go unnoticed. Chaebols (conglomerates) such as Samsung and SK Hynix dominate the global semiconductor market and account for over one fifth of global semiconductor manufacturing. South Korea’s recent upgrading of relations with Italy to that of a Special Strategic Partnership places particular focus on AI, space and high-tech industries while reaffirming the need for stability in the Indo-Pacific. In a world of economic and geopolitical interconnectedness between the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific, Asia’s concerns are also those of Europe – and vice versa. Within the as yet unregulated domain of AI, Seoul and the G7 should lead the campaign for responsible global AI governance. The co-hosting of the AI Seoul Summit between London and Seoul in 2024 only stressed the potential for such collaboration.

One hindrance to South Korea’s potential membership of the Group of Seven has been Japan’s presence as one of the founding fathers. Historical memory does not evaporate easily. The vicissitudes of election cycles in Seoul and Tokyo inevitably raise the risk that any South Korean membership could revive the scarcely dormant flames of political polarisation in both countries. At the same time, however, evidence points to the contrary. South Korea’s invitation to the 2023 G7 Summit in Hiroshima evinced the new reality of the need to move beyond the past towards a more geopolitically and economically prosperous future. Since then, the threats posed by China’s regional and global economic and geopolitical coercion together with North Korea’s renewed relationship with Russia have only become more acute, affecting both Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific members of the G7 and, of course, the survival of the West.

An expanded G7 offers a useful alternative, though not an equivalent, to the United Nations Security Council, the latter of which is at its most impotent since its postwar inception, owing to Russia and China’s obstinate obstructiveness. Whether vetoing draft sanction resolutions on North Korea or, as seen in April this year, passing resolutions calling for freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, the collective security organisation created to ‘end the scourge of war’ can do little but watch as Moscow and Beijing continue to support Pyongyang’s sanctions evasion and nuclear programme, among others. South Korea’s presidency of the Security Council in 2024 and 2025 could not have come at a worse time.

Next year, the United States will host the G7, after hosting the Group of Twenty (G20) in Miami later this year. It will be a useful test of whether the language of common interests can translate into actionable realities. In 2028, South Korea will host the G20, in what will be the latter’s 20th anniversary. This is not an opportunity to be sniffed at. Not unreasonably, Seoul hopes both to contribute to stronger G20 cooperation ‘to unravel complexities in international affairs’ and to lead such efforts. For Seoul, the challenge remains to balance localised peninsula concerns against the bolstering of its own global platform, not as a beneficiary and supporter of Washington but as a key global geopolitical and economic actor in its own right.

When President Donald Trump made clear at the end of this week’s G7 Summit that ‘Russia must end this war [against Ukraine]’, it was a reminder that the Group of Seven is not simply about economics. Geopolitics moves ever further to the forefront of the Group’s concerns. As the Ukraine War and conflict in the Gulf have shown, the effects of today’s wars are rarely confined to their geographical vicinity. There is no better example than South Korea of how contemporary problems facing the ‘whole industrialised world’ are no longer limited to Europe and North America. It is time for Seoul to turn the Group of Seven into the Group of Eight.