By: Khushbu Ahlawat, Consulting Editor, GSDN
For a concept that has been “about to happen” for eighteen years, the idea of a D10 — a formal club of ten leading democracies built around the G7 — keeps resurfacing at exactly the moments when the world’s democracies feel most outnumbered. This September is one of those moments. Within the space of ten days, New Delhi hosted the 18th BRICS summit with eleven member states and a clutch of partner countries at its table, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation had already met in Bishkek, and the UN General Assembly’s marathon session in New York opened against the backdrop of a much-anticipated Trump-Xi meeting on artificial intelligence. Against that backdrop, it is tempting to look at the G7’s expanding guest list — India, Australia, South Korea and others showing up summit after summit — and conclude that an informal D10 already exists in all but name, and that formalising it is simply a matter of political will.
That is a more contestable claim than it looks. A closer look at how the G7’s 2026 summit in Évian was actually assembled suggests the opposite lesson: the “coalition of democracies” that shows up at G7 tables each year is not consolidating into a stable ten-member club. It is doing something messier — expanding, contracting and reshuffling by host-country preference, which is precisely why, after nearly two decades of advocacy, no G7 government has been willing to give it a name.
An idea older than most of its supporters remember
The D10 concept did not emerge from a single dramatic proposal. It was assembled in stages, each one responding to a different anxiety about the durability of the post-Cold War order. Its earliest articulation came from within the US State Department’s policy-planning staff around 2008, where officials began sketching what a values-based grouping of the G7 plus Australia, India and South Korea might look like as a complement to — not a replacement for — existing institutions. The idea then migrated to the think-tank world: the Atlantic Council opened a “D10 Strategic Forum” in 2014, running informal, official-level dialogues that have continued annually since, drawing in observers from India, Indonesia, Poland and Spain along the way.
It took a very specific technological panic to turn the idea from a seminar topic into a headline. In 2020, as governments across Europe debated whether to strip Huawei out of their 5G networks, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson floated a “Democracy 10” as a vehicle for jointly developing alternative telecoms suppliers — a proposal to use collective democratic weight to break a single company’s, and by extension a single state’s, grip on critical infrastructure. Johnson subsequently used the UK’s G7 presidency to invite the leaders of Australia, India and South Korea (along with South Africa) to the 2021 Cornwall summit as guests, a pattern that has essentially held ever since, chair by chair.
What is notable is how narrow the original justification was. The D10 was conceived as a project about supply chains and standards — 5G first, later semiconductors, critical minerals and AI governance — not as a security alliance or a diplomatic bloc with its own foreign policy. That framing matters for judging what has, and has not, actually converged in the years since.
The convergence case, and its limits
There is a real trend line to point to. At the 2023 Hiroshima summit, G7 leaders spent unusual amounts of time on economic coercion and supply-chain resilience — an implicit China conversation conducted mostly in the language of “de-risking” rather than decoupling. At Kananaskis in 2025, the grouping launched a critical-minerals action plan and pushed forward on AI governance with Australia, India and South Korea in the room, prompting commentary that every member of the Quad — the US, Japan, Australia and India — had effectively sat at a single table. Canada’s Mark Carney made the strategic logic explicit at the time, describing India’s inclusion in terms of its centrality to global supply chains rather than shared political values, which is itself telling about how the invitations are actually justified.
But 2026 complicates this narrative more than it confirms it. France’s Évian summit in June, held under President Emmanuel Macron, did not simply reconvene the “G7 plus three” formula. Paris invited five partner countries to the Sherpa track and the leaders’ sessions — Brazil, Egypt, India, Kenya and South Korea — while Australia, a charter member of every D10 proposal since 2008, was left off the guest list entirely. In its place came Kenya and Egypt, neither of which features in any version of the D10 concept, plus a separate cluster of Gulf and Middle Eastern leaders (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Ukraine) invited for sessions specifically framed around the war in Ukraine and Middle East stability rather than democratic solidarity. The unifying theme of Évian, according to the French hosts, was “Forging New Partnerships and Rebuilding International Solidarity” — a title that speaks to French diplomatic priorities around Africa, the Gulf and the Global South, not to a consolidating club of democracies.
This is not a minor scheduling quirk. It reveals what the G7 outreach list has actually become under successive presidencies: a mirror of each host nation’s own foreign-policy priorities, redrawn every year. Germany’s 2022 and Italy’s 2024 presidencies invited India alone, notably leaving out Australia and South Korea — a choice widely read in Berlin and Rome as reluctance to appear to be building an anti-China bloc on European soil. France’s 2026 list swapped in African and Gulf partners instead of the Indo-Pacific triad. The pattern is not a democracy club slowly hardening into ten permanent seats; it is a rotating cast whose composition tracks whichever G7 capital happens to be hosting, and whatever crisis — Ukraine, the Middle East, African debt, AI — that capital wants to headline that year.
India is the one genuine constant. It has now attended G7 outreach sessions in some form for seven consecutive years, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi used his 2026 Évian appearance to press a Global South argument about trust deficits and underrepresentation in global governance — a message aimed as much at reforming existing institutions as at joining a new democratic bloc. That consistency is real, and it is the strongest empirical case that India, at least, has become indispensable to the G7’s outward-facing agenda. But indispensability to one country’s invitation list is different from the existence of a ten-member coalition with defined membership, and the 2026 guest roster is proof that the “ten” in D10 is, at best, aspirational.
Meanwhile, the rival bloc keeps meeting too
It is worth setting this against what happened in New Delhi the same week this piece went to print. The 18th BRICS summit, chaired by India under the banner “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability,” produced a New Delhi Declaration running to some 140 paragraphs, adopted unanimously by all eleven members despite sharp internal disagreements — the summit had to paper over divisions between members on both sides of the Iran conflict and could not bring itself to name the United States directly even while criticising tariff wars. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were both present. The declaration touched on local-currency payment systems, the New Development Bank, AI governance and counter-terrorism language that pointedly referenced the 2025 Jammu and Kashmir attack — a notable diplomatic win for India within a bloc it does not fully trust.
The point is not that BRICS is more coherent than the G7’s democratic outreach — by most independent readings, BRICS remains a coalition of convenience held together more by shared grievance against Western-dominated institutions than by any positive common project, and analysts described this year’s outcome as “modest” precisely because so many members had reason to want it to fail. The point is that both blocs are, in their own ways, loose and improvised, and India sits inside both of them simultaneously, extracting leverage from each without formally committing to either. A formal D10 would require India to make a choice that its own diplomacy has spent a decade avoiding.
Why formalisation keeps stalling — and why that might be the right call
None of this means the D10 idea is worthless. The functional cooperation it has produced — on critical minerals, on 5G and telecoms security, increasingly on AI governance — is real and useful, and it has grown steadily each summit cycle regardless of what the grouping calls itself. But three structural obstacles explain why, after eighteen years, no G7 government has actually proposed making it permanent.
The first is continental Europe’s persistent unease. Germany and Italy’s decisions to invite India without its Indo-Pacific partners, and France’s 2026 substitution of African and Gulf outreach for the Australia-South Korea axis, both reflect a European preference for keeping China-adjacent messaging implicit rather than explicit. A named D10, with China unmentioned but unmistakably the subtext, would be harder to keep deniable.
The second is the unpredictability of the United States itself under the current administration, whose bilateral, transactional approach to allies sits uneasily with the idea of binding itself into a standing multilateral body with fixed membership and shared positions — the same unpredictability that has scrambled G7 unity on tariffs and Ukraine policy over the past two years.
The third, less discussed, is opportunity cost. Every year the G7’s outreach list is redrawn to fit that year’s crises — Ukraine and the Middle East in 2026, critical minerals and AI in 2025 — democracies retain the flexibility to build ad hoc coalitions suited to the problem at hand, rather than being locked into a fixed roster that might not fit the next crisis. Kenya and Egypt’s presence at Évian, driven by African debt and Middle East diplomacy rather than any democratic credential test, is a feature of that flexibility, not a bug to be engineered away.
A named D10 would trade this adaptability for clarity and symbolic weight — useful currency in a summit season this crowded, but not obviously worth the diplomatic cost of formally declaring a democratic bloc at a moment when the G7’s own hosts cannot agree on who belongs in it. The more realistic near-term outcome is what has actually been happening: growing functional cooperation on specific files — minerals, AI standards, supply-chain resilience — carried out by whichever subset of democracies has skin in that particular game, dressed up each year in whatever coalition the host capital finds diplomatically convenient. That may be less tidy than a named club of ten. It has also, so far, proved more durable than any of the formal proposals sitting in Atlantic Council file drawers since 2014.
What a more honest middle path looks like
If naming the coalition is politically premature, the alternative is not to abandon the project but to be more precise about what is actually being built. Advocates on both sides of the Atlantic have tended to conflate two different things: a security-and-values alliance modelled loosely on NATO’s political solidarity, and a narrower, technocratic coalition built around specific chokepoints in the global economy — telecoms equipment, semiconductor supply chains, rare-earth processing, AI safety standards. The second project has actually delivered results, from the critical-minerals action plan agreed at Kananaskis to the emerging AI-governance conversations that dominated both Kananaskis and Évian. The first project — a values-based alliance with a permanent secretariat, of the kind the Atlantic Council sketched out as far back as 2019 — has delivered almost nothing, precisely because it asks capitals to commit to a shared foreign policy they do not actually share, on China, on Russia, or on how confrontational to be with either.
Treating these as one project is what keeps stalling formalisation. A functional D10 — a standing, sherpa-level coordination mechanism for supply-chain and technology-standards cooperation among a flexible set of capable economies, without the language of a democratic bloc or a shared security posture — would be far easier for continental Europe to sign onto, since it avoids the anti-China framing that Berlin, Rome and Paris have each resisted in different summit cycles. It would also suit India, which has consistently sought the economic and technological benefits of closer G7 alignment while refusing anything that reads as bloc alignment against Russia or China, given its BRICS membership, its dependence on Russian energy and defence equipment, and its own unresolved border tensions with Beijing that require careful management rather than open confrontation.
This is, in effect, close to what has already been happening under different names each year — but making it durable would mean giving the functional cooperation a standing institutional home, independent of whichever country holds the rotating G7 presidency, so that critical-minerals and AI-governance work does not have to be re-negotiated and re-justified every twelve months depending on whether the host capital that year prioritises the Indo-Pacific, Africa or the Gulf. That is a far more modest ambition than the “alliance of democracies” that Atlantic Council reports and British prime ministers have periodically proposed. It is also, on the evidence of Évian’s scrambled guest list, a great deal closer to what G7 governments are actually willing to build.
