L’AQUILA, Italy—Summit planners seem to be capable of a kind of math most of us can only marvel at.
One of the key sessions at the international confab President Barack Obama is attending here this week was referred to as the G8 + 5 + 1 + 5.
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For those who aren’t conversant in summit lingo, that’s the Group of Eight developed countries (the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Canada), plus five developing countries asked to join the group in recent years (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa), plus one country that got a special invite from Italian Prime Minister and G8 president Silvio Berlusconi (Egypt), plus five international organizations.
If that wasn’t enough, the summiteers also met in some, but not all, of the smaller configurations. The G8 itself had several sessions. And the G8+5+1 met without the extra five.
Now the G8 used to be the G6, before Canada was added in 1976. Russia scored an invite beginning in 1994, creating what was known for a while as the G7+1. The Russians got upgraded to full membership in 1997.
Debuting at this year’s meeting was the MEF-17, 17 major economies Obama asked to discuss climate change. And of course, leaders discussed the G8-backed African development initiative known as the New Partnership for African Development or NEPAD, for short.
True summit cognoscenti, as this year’s hosts would say, have heard of bilateral or even multilateral meetings, but Obama’s key envoy at the G8, Mike Froman, took the lingo to new heights Thursday when he referred to leaders meeting “plurilaterally.”
In fact, the official G8 summit website suggests the G8+5+1+5 session actually involved not five international organizations but seven: the IEA, ILO, IMF, OECD, UN, WB, and WTO.
It’s all is enough to give leave a summiteer wondering, as Obama’s National security adviser, Gen. Jim Jones, did in another context the other day, “WTF”?