Canada’s reputation as civil, beautiful but boring has been revised by Donald Trump. It has become a nation of great geopolitical interest thanks to the US president’s open desire to annex it as the 51st united state.
Trump and Mark Carney, his North American adversary, are both on their home continent this week for the G7 Summit, held this year in the Rocky Mountain resort of Kananaskis.
Personal tensions between the “leaders of the free world” are likely to be high. Carney, whose turn it is to host what is amusingly the 51st G7 summit, owes his recent election as Canadian prime minister to Trump’s territorial threat. Britain and France, Canada’s ancestral imperialists have both sharply defended Canadian independence. So have the European Union’s representatives while Trump has kept up unrelenting insults of the EU as “nastier than China” and there “to screw America”.
Trump’s decision to fly home early overnight, tweeting out insults at “publicity-seeking President Emmanuel Macron” shows that that feeling is mutual as far as he and the G7 are concerned. Trump is snubbing the talks with President Zelensky.
It is the second G7 in Canada that President Trump has cut short. Carney had already decided not to have an agreed communiqué to deny Trump the chance to beat his chest by refusing to sign up. Now any message the summit sends out on Ukraine of the Middle East is guaranteed not to have the imprimatur of a united Group of Seven.
The private mood between leaders is as rocky as the venue. Yet however badly Trump behaves, the others will force smiles. Sir Keir Starmer even grovelled at the president’s feet, to pick up papers “Donald” had dropped.
So this meeting of the world’s richest democratic nations will achieve even less than had been hoped. When it ends on Wednesday their leaders’ deliberations will have barely registered on the consciousness of the electorates back in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada.
In part, this reflects the diminished economic muscle of the bloc. In part it is because of the Trump-inspired disunity. In part, it is because of widespread public distrust of politicians and the diminishing quality of those who emerge as national leaders.
When the French president issued the first invitation in 1975, the six member nations represented in Rambouillet accounted for around three quarters of global wealth and GDP. (Canada was co-opted the following year.) Today, together, they represent 50% at best, more like 30% of world spending power. Much has changed since then.
Russia came in and out of what was called G8 between 1997 and 2014 as Yeltsin’s liberalism decayed into Putin’s autocracy.
When the 2008 banking crisis hit, a bigger more inclusive group – the G20 – had to be convened to manage it.
The BRICS group – comprised of five founding members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, and six new members, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – has risen and is competing to woo allies.
This year, the President of Indonesia accepted his invitation to G7 before deciding to hold talks with the Singaporean prime minister instead. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Saud declined. Mexico’s president is not sure she’ll bother to go. It remains to be seen how many of the other guests from Brazil, India, South Korea, Australia and South Africa take up what was once the most sought-after invitation to participate on the club’s second day. Attending as an extra nation at G7 has become an indicator of affinity to the old West, rather than an essential visit.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine is going of course. So is Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of Nato. Ukraine’s war effort is heavily dependent on support from Europe and NATO. Zelenskyy still must wrangle Trump, the most important and least reliable backer of his country. All of which enhances the impression that G7 is now merely a Eurocentric power bloc rather than a forum for globalised co-operation, as it once purported to be.
If the United States is rejecting globalisation and opting for “America First”, the other national leaders in G7 are still pretending that little has changed. Perhaps the others have no other choice. They need to keep the US on side for as long as they can because of its strength and historic ties, while recognising that all of the members – including Trump – do not have the power they once enjoyed.
While Trump may Make America Great Again – or at any rate whiter, more unequal and more expensive to live in – he has demonstrably diminished its influence or relevance to the rest of the world.
His boasts of bringing peace in short order are being actively defied by Netanyahu, Putin, Hamas, Zelenskyy and Iran. He has alienated his allies and rivals alike with his tariffs. In spite of vaunted deals, including with the UK, it remains unclear whether he has the will to impose them to the full extent.
The other leaders are reluctant to explain America’s decline to their electorates, presumably for fear of poking the Trumpian bear. As a result, the world is drifting with no alternative leadership on offer and multiple potential disasters looming ever closer.
For all their talk of “de-escalation”, the G7 leaders are exerting little practical influence over the conflict between Iran and Israel. Mindful of their voters at home, they are reluctant either to take action against Israel over Gaza, or, to state clearly the implications of agreeing with Israel that Iranian nuclear weapons would be a menace to the world.
True to form, Keir Starmer is voicing the expected platitudes. In these dispiriting times, the new editor of The New Statesman Tom McTague has produced a lengthy and dispiriting profile of the prime minister after spending many hours with him. McTague’s cover story concludes that Starmer sees himself as “the manager” of a nation which “will become more content with reduced circumstances, more emotionally controlled, more normal”. That is not much of an ambition for Great Britain.
Inexperience among G7 leaders is to blame, alongside lack of clarity and feebleness. Turnover at the top of politics is speeding up. This is the first G7 Summit and first visit for Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer. The Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and host Mark Carney are fellow G7 Summit virgins – although Carney has been in the margins before as a national bank governor. Covid cancelled the last G7 Trump was due to be at in 2020. He failed to organise a zoom call in its place.
That leaves Giorgia Meloni of Italy, with two previous G7 attendances, and French President Emmanuel Macron, who is at his 8th G7, as the veterans. Neither is able to offer alternative leadership to the Americans.
Macron’s recent speech advocating a two-state solution regardless of recent developments in the Middle East was described by the sympathising podcaster and former UK minister Rory Stewart as “a glimpse of a fading world – in which power and rules have shifted completely and in very disturbing ways – while Western politicians continue to intone the old incantations.”
Macron can orate because French presidents are responsible for foreign policy. Domestically, Macron’s faction has already lost control of the parliament. He is term limited, and the hard-right National Rally are leading challengers to succeed him.
Meloni’s charm has forged good personal relations with many of her opposite numbers. But as a representative of a formerly neo-fascist party, Fratelli d’Italia, her scope for influence is limited, even if she wanted to assert it. Italy remains comparatively weak in Europe both economically and in its defence contribution.
The leaders to watch may well be the experienced technocrats Mark Carney of Canada and the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Hitherto, Carney has been more inclined to smooth management than confrontation. As an elected politician, he has developed a hard edge – but Canada cannot solve Europe’s problems.
Merz has been impressively crisp since becoming chancellor earlier this year. He represents the most powerful nation in Europe but he has had to form a coalition to govern. Then again, as Trump menaced, “General MacArthur wouldn’t like it” if German re-armament goes too far.
Underlining the humdrum nature of this G7, the Canadians have opted to hold it somewhere where they have done it before, for the first time in the seven such summits they have hosted. Long forgotten is any expansive notion of showing off the beauties of your country. Hosts choose somewhere too remote for terrorists, protesters and all but the most determined journalists. Kananaskis is an hour by road from Calgary, the nearest big town.
Back in 2002, Tony Blair and George W. Bush were in their pre-Iraq War pomp. They were bold enough to want to police the world. When we arrived to cover that first Summit, my TV colleague and I debated how to pronounce the Kananaskis. “It’s easy,” Bill Neely of ITN and CBS assured me, “it ends like “ass kiss”. There will be plenty of that going on between our disappointing leaders this week, much good that it will do them or us.