“Stuck in the middle with you”: Should Australia join the D7?

(Lisa Martin – Lowy The Interpreter) Against the backdrop of an alphabet soup of leader summits producing hotly debated, but quickly forgotten, communiqués littered with platitudes, is there room for a new club of middle power democracies? Former NATO secretary-general and ex-Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen thinks the time is ripe for some new diplomatic architecture. Rasmussen has delivered a clarion call to protect democracy amid a ruptured rules-based international order and rampant democratic backsliding. At a recent summit in Copenhagen, he made the case for a new alliance, the Democracy 7 (D7), consisting of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. – “Stuck in the middle with you”: Should Australia join the D7? | Lowy Institute