(MENAFN- The Journal Of Turkish Weekly) The leaders of seven major industrialized countries are in Germany for their annual summit, with issues as varied as the economy, climate change and world crises on their agenda.
Traditional German music greeted U.S. President Barack Obama as he joined summit host Chancellor Angela Merkel for a visit to a local village Sunday morning.
Within a few hours they would be sitting with their counterparts from Canada, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and the European Union for secluded talks on key world issues.
The president described what he called the "difficult challenges" they would be discussing.
"We're going to discuss our shared future, the global economy that creates jobs and opportunity, maintaining a strong and prosperous European Union, forging new trade partnerships across the Atlantic, standing up to Russian aggression in Ukraine, combating threats from violent extremism to climate change," he said.
Chancellor Merkel called the U.S. "our friend and our partner."
The leaders are expected to agree to continue sanctions on Russia, which was a member of this group until it invaded and occupied Ukraine's Crimea region last year, and began its support for rebels in eastern Ukraine.
New issues
They are also expected to discuss several crises in the Middle East, and China's new effort to build and expand islands in the Pacific, which could be used to control key navigation channels.
At the Royal United Services Institute in London, Jonathan Eyal says in recent decades the G7 has mostly dealt with broad issues, but the emergence of the concerns about China and Russia make this summit something of a throwback.
"In a curious way, it's a very old-fashioned agenda. We tended to believe that all future conflicts would be multi-national, global in essence. In fact, the position of two big powers in the world is now again the subject of very serious discussion," he said.
But the impact these leaders can have on any of those issues is incremental at best, says International Economy professor Leila Simona Talani of London's King's College. Still, she says the G7 is somewhat ironically as important as it has ever been because larger organizations, like the Group of Twenty, have not been effective.
"There was a moment at the beginning of the 2000s that everyone believed everyone will have to be part of the decision-making bodies of the globe," she said. "But this, I don't think, is happening. The real conflicts, like the ones in the Middle East, make the role of the superpowers more important because obviously these are the only ones who can tackle those kind of conflicts."
But not everyone is happy about that.
Protesters rally against G7
Hundreds of protesters have gathered in the area to accuse the G7 of being the source of the world's problems. Police removed several who tried to block a road Sunday morning, and others marched across a field where they had been allowed to set up camp and tried to get close to the summit hotel.
More than 15,000 German security personnel are keeping the protesters at bay and ensuring the leaders are safe as they uphold the G7 tradition of spending a couple of days largely on their own, discussing the world's most pressing issues.
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