[WASHINGTON] US President Donald Trump arrives in Canada as the centre of attention for a Group of Seven (G7) summit of world leaders whose main purpose will be to mollify him – and one where spiralling conflict in the Middle East offers another test of its unity.
Trump was travelling on Sunday (Jun 15) night to Kananaskis, Alberta, for the first big international summit of his second term. Wary of opening new rifts with the US president, other G7 leaders will not even try for a statement of unity on matters such as Ukraine or climate change.
It’s not even clear that they will be able to demonstrate a sense of common purpose over the conflict between Israel and Iran that began with Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear sites late last week. Those strikes continued over the weekend, fanning fears of a regional war.
Trump has called for a ceasefire but is helping Israel defend itself, while others such as French President Emmanuel Macron have urged the sides to avoid further escalation.
Instead of speaking to allies about the fighting, Trump discussed the conflict in a Saturday call with the G7’s main adversary, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a central antagonist in a war with Ukraine that’s also frustrated Trump.
Macron, speaking to reporters on Sunday, dismissed the notion of Putin mediating the Middle East conflict, saying the Russian leader, given his flouting of international norms, could not “be in any way a mediator”.
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More than a dozen leaders from around the world were set to join Trump at the Pomeroy Kananaskis Mountain Lodge looking to strike trade deals to stave off a fresh round of US tariffs as early as next month.
The meeting’s remote location means it will be inaccessible to protesters and give leaders the freedom to meet Trump on neutral turf instead of under the glare of the cameras in the Oval Office where he’s in control and playing to his domestic audience.
Trade deals
Leaders from Brazil, South Africa, India, and South Korea will be there seeking to protect their own interests, as will Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, looking to shore up support for his nation’s fight against Russia despite Trump’s ambivalence.
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum is likely to get her first one-on-one in-person meeting with Trump, while also seeking a fresh US-Mexico-Canada trade deal along with the event’s host, Prime Minister Mark Carney.
The Canadian leader, meanwhile, will seek to balance standing up to Trump’s calls to make Canada the 51st state while avoiding the flareups that turned past summits into displays of rancour and disunity.
“The best case scenario in my mind, coming out of this, is that there’s no real blowups,” said Josh Lipsky, chair of international economics at the Atlantic Council think-tank.
Trump has long considered such summits tedious, and used them to pick fights with fellow leaders. One of his first, the 2017 G20 in Hamburg, was marked by widespread protests, with posters plastered around the city calling Trump a clown. An enduring image of his first G7, in Italy, was six leaders walking together while Trump travelled separately in a golf cart.
A year later at a G7 meeting also in Canada, Trump made his most indelible mark on the summit circuit. A viral photo showed him sitting defiant, with arms crossed, staring up at then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while other leaders stood around her.
He then upended the event by pulling out of the joint communique that had been forged in the meeting and firing an angry tweet at then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the Canadian leader’s criticisms of Trump’s tariff policies.
That photo, along with Trump’s eruption, casts a “long shadow” over this year’s summit, said Caitlin Welsh, who served as a US summit official during Trump’s first term and is now a programme director with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
It showed “that consensus outcomes could not be taken for granted in the G7 or G20 or other bodies”, Welsh said.
Even after that, leaders were never quite sure what to make of Trump. In 2019, a hot mic caught leaders – including Trudeau – at another summit griping about Trump running late. At President Joe Biden’s first G7 in 2021, he declared “America is back”, to which Macron shot back – “For how long?”
Now Trump returns, both to the summit sanctum and to Canada, after a bruising tariff war and his refusal to back down from the 51st state threat. That stoked widespread anger in the country and helped fuel Carney’s spring election victory. Trump himself has claimed credit.
Playing nice
But while earlier summits saw Trump spar with counterparts, this batch of leaders have tended to try to play nice with Trump, soothing his ego and avoiding confrontations. And several, such as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Macron and Carney have all had relatively successful – or at least unremarkable – meetings with Trump since his return to office.
And there are widespread signs the bloc wants to maintain that approach. Macron is the sole holdover from Trump’s first term. While he will look to maintain pleasant relations with Trump, he visited Greenland on the way to Canada, a nod of support after Trump mused about annexing the Danish territory.
Leaders are not preparing a joint communique this time around given that differences are too large on everything from climate change to artificial intelligence (AI) to women’s empowerment. Instead, they are set to issue statements on half a dozen subjects, though Ukraine is not among them.
The US will also push to discuss trade, expanding exports of American energy and AI development, a White House official said on Friday in a briefing that made no direct mention of Iran. The leaders are also expected to discuss breaking their dependency on China for critical minerals, according to a German official.
Trump has set so-called “reciprocal” tariffs at 10 per cent for about five dozen countries and the EU, but has made a Jul 9 deadline to reach deals or see the tariffs rise again. That threat hangs over nearly every leader at the summit.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has touted the progress made so far, as his trade negotiator makes near-weekly visits to the US to negotiate terms, but has also expressed caution about rushing into an agreement. Japan is seeking the removal of the levies – and is a test case of Trump’s willingness to negotiate auto tariffs in particular.
“What’s important is to achieve an agreement that’s beneficial to both Japan and the US,” Ishiba said last week. “We will not compromise Japan’s interests by prioritising a quick deal.” BLOOMBERG
