President Donald Trump’s decision to leave the G7 Summit at Kananaskis a day early was not unprecedented. Theresa May left the G7 Summit in Taormina a day early in 2017, following a terrorist attack in Manchester. And it could be argued that the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran was sufficiently serious to justify his early return to Washington.
But the consequence of his early departure was that the president missed a critically important discussion with President Zelenskyy over maintaining support for Ukraine and putting pressure on Russia to accept a ceasefire. He was also absent from the single summit session with ‘outreach’ leaders from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa and South Korea on energy security.
Trump’s departure also reflects a much deeper challenge to the role of the G7 and an urgent need for the non-US members to rethink how they seek to engage with the president.
Purpose of the G7
Since its foundation fifty years ago, the G7 has evolved so that it now has essentially four goals: to coordinate its members’ efforts to solve global problems; to defend common Western interests; to resolve internal disputes; and to underpin an all-year network of information exchange and consultation among officials.
The G7 reached a high point in its cohesion and effectiveness in its response to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But it was clear from the start of President Trump’s second term that it would struggle to deliver in the same way, as had also been the case during his first term.
Early statements and actions by Trump have eroded fundamentally the trust necessary to make the G7 work. In particular, he has repeatedly threatened the sovereignty of two G7 members – Canada and the EU (Greenland is Danish sovereign territory) – and undermined NATO’s security guarantees.
His tariff campaign has targeted close allies in the G7 just as aggressively as other countries. Senior members of his administration have supported far right parties campaigning against G7 leaders. And Trump has withdrawn US support from global efforts to tackle poverty and address existential threats from climate change and infectious disease.
A stripped-down agenda
Against this unpromising backdrop, Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, designed this week’s summit agenda to meet US sensitivities, while attempting to address at least some fundamental global issues.
The prime minister’s priorities for the summit avoided all mention of trade, climate change, global health threats or poverty. Instead he focused on issues where he hoped to find some consensus with the US, such as tackling transitional crime, strengthening supply chains for critical materials, capitalizing on AI and quantum computing for growth, and boosting private investment in infrastructure.
The Canadian hosts also indicated there would be no overarching communique, only individual statements on specific issues. This would avoid the risk of President Trump disowning the whole communique, as had happened at the 2018 Canadian G7 summit in Charlevoix.
By focusing on new issues only – and avoiding a recap of all outstanding G7 positions – the ‘mini statements’ approach would also avoid the risk of opening up issues where the president has not yet expressed a clear view (such as the role of the IMF), or the need for tortuous negotiations on split texts (for instance on climate change).
It’s likely that the non-US ‘G6’ leaders did express their views to the president on the threats to global prosperity resulting from his tariff campaign and plans for further fiscal easing in the US. But this did not lead to any public agreements or presumably any change of view by the president.
The summit produced a weak statement on the Iran–Israel conflict calling for de-escalation, but only after the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme had been resolved.
In addition, there were short statements from the G7 as a whole on tackling the threat of forest wildfires, migrant smuggling, critical materials, transnational repression and the digital economy. Some of these were endorsed by various guest countries. All the other issues discussed were summarized in a chairman’s statement which did not require agreement from the US delegation.
It could be argued that by avoiding a major public conflict at the summit, the G6 leaders preserved the ground for the best possible outcome at the NATO summit on 24-25 June.
Nonetheless, the end result of all this effort – and a hosting cost to the Canadian tax-payer in the region of US$300 million – must be disappointing both for the hosts and all other countries that attended the summit, except the US.
Redesigning the G7
The next G7 summit will be hosted by France in 2026 in Evian-Les-Bains. Most of the economic themes – macroeconomic stability and growth, climate change and energy transition, global health threats, industrial strategy/economic security, development finance and poverty reduction – can be identified now.
One option for France is to approach the next summit in a similar manner to the Canadians. That means trying to identify a limited set of issues on which the US is sufficiently open that there is scope for consensus, and keep other issues, however important, completely off the agenda or for private discussion only.
