President Donald Trump proposed on Saturday hosting the G7 Summit in September and inviting additional countries, including Russia and Australia.
The president said that he planned to invite Russia, South Korea, Australia, and India to the summit.
“I don’t feel that as a G7 it properly represents what’s going on in the world. It’s a very outdated group of countries,” he said.
The president spoke to reporters on Air Force One after returning from the SpaceX/NASA manned spaceflight launch in Florida.
The G7 organization includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 2014, Russia was suspended from the group after annexing Crimea from Ukraine during former President Barack Obama’s presidency.
The president previously floated the idea of hosting the G7 summit in June in the United States despite the Chinese virus pandemic.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, refused to attend a June summit, despite President Trump’s eagerness to bring the member countries together.
White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah said the summit would focus on bringing together traditional allies of the United States to talk about how to deal with the future of China.