Leaders seek to avoid disaster with Trump at G7, where Israel-Iran conflict will loom large

CNN, GETTY IMAGES, 01:14 – 01:32, TWITTER, STEFFEN SEIBERT, GERMAN FEDERAL PRESS OFFICE, Twitter/Steffen Seibert/German Federal Press Office

By Kevin Liptak, CNN

Calgary, Alberta (CNN) — It’s a tableau no world leader — except perhaps President Donald Trump — wants to repeat.

Convening in the Canadian Rockies for this week’s Group of 7 summit, presidents and prime ministers are hoping to avoid the acrimony that pervaded the last time this country played host to the world’s most exclusive club.

The mood in Quebec seven years ago was immortalized best in a photograph rivaling any Baroque masterpiece for drama. Glowering with his arms crossed, Trump sat beneath a stern German Chancellor Angela Merkel and stoic Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as they hashed out a joint statement Trump later tore up.

“This photo captured the acrimonious spirit of that summit,” said Caitlin Welsh, who in her role on the National Security Council in Trump’s first term helped prepare for his participation in G7 summits.

Seven years later, Merkel is retired, Abe was killed by an assassin in 2022 and that year’s host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — who Trump accused of being “dishonest” and “weak” as he jetted away from the summit site — stepped down in January amid rising unpopularity.

In fact, of the seven elected leaders convening in Alberta this week, four will be attending their first G7 as heads of government, reflecting extraordinary annual turnover in the world’s leading economies.

Trump, meanwhile, hasn’t attended a world leader summit in six years.

That makes for a new dynamic to play out in the picturesque peaks of Kananaskis, where the spiraling conflict between Israel and Iran will now compete with other global flashpoints — the Ukraine war and trade tensions chief among them — for attention from the heads of the world’s leading economies.

Leaders here will be forced to reckon with further instability in the Middle East and the prospect of higher energy prices, but it wasn’t clear as the summit was getting underway how the situation would be addressed.

“This issue will be very high on the agenda of the G7 summit,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said as he departed for Canada, saying his goals included ensuring Iran doesn’t possess a nuclear weapon, avoiding escalation and leaving open room for a diplomatic resolution.

Already, the summit’s Canadian hosts had scrapped attempts at producing the joint communiqué that leaders traditionally release at the end of a conference. It was Trump’s intransigence over the 2018 statement that produced that year’s iconic photograph.

Instead, organizers hope this year’s gathering will produce shorter, more focused statements that can avoid the kind of blowup that would further expose the fractures that have emerged between the US and its traditional allies.

Those cracks have been most apparent on the war in Ukraine, which had been a primary focus of the last three G7 summits. Aides to former President Joe Biden had come to label the group the “steering committee of the free world” for its role in coordinating Western response to Russia’s invasion.

European leaders once hoped to use this year’s conference to spur more action against Russia, including lowering an oil price cap that would limit Moscow’s energy revenues. But heading into the summit, the US was not on board, and Trump appears reluctant to impose new sanctions on Russia.

Still, the leaders will welcome Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for talks on Tuesday, and Ukrainian officials are hoping a positive interaction with Trump could advance Kyiv’s case.

Trump’s aides have focused less on Ukraine in the lead-up to the summit and more on trade, a signature issue that has thrown the global economic outlook into turmoil. Less than a month before stiff new tariffs come into effect, Trump is eager to demonstrate progress on trade negotiations that so far have yielded only one framework agreement with the United Kingdom.

It’s unlikely new deals are announced this week in Canada, however, and officials tempered expectations for major breakthroughs.

A senior US official described Canada as working with member nations on “short, action-oriented leader statements on key issues of common interest” to release at the summit’s conclusion, and said discussions would center on trade and the global economy, critical minerals, migrant and drug smuggling, wildfires, international security, artificial intelligence and energy security.

“The president is eager to pursue his goals in all of these areas, including making America’s trade relationships fair and reciprocal,” the official said.

What type of collective sentiment can be struck on trade, Ukraine or any of the world’s other problems remained to be seen. And it was far from certain Trump had much interest in demonstrating solidarity with nations he’s often treated as enemies rather than friends.

“President Trump approaches multilateral fora with extreme skepticism,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. “He does not view these organizations as ways to deepen and expand American power and influence. He sees these fora as constraining America, and I think that’s something to remember as he goes into this. He is skeptical towards the G7’s consensus-driven approach.”

Both Trump’s temperament and his global outlook have shaped how this year’s summit was planned. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has gone out of his way to avoid any unpleasantness, even though Trump has threatened his country’s sovereignty by musing about making it the 51st US state.

While past summits have featured sessions on topics that only underscored other leaders’ differences with Trump, like a gender equality breakfast he turned up late to in 2018, this time the focus will largely stick to economic and security matters.

And instead of lengthy group meetings, this year’s schedule features relatively short sessions, with more time for one-on-one talks that Trump prefers.

That includes talks not only with the seven leaders of the summit’s members, but also with some of the invited guests, including Zelensky and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, who has sharply criticized Trump’s immigration enforcement actions in the US.

The first international summit of Trump’s second term will make for an important window into the US leader’s willingness and desire to engage his counterparts collectively, rather than in the confines of the Oval Office, where he has staged sometimes combative encounters with his visitors.

By the end of his first term, Trump had grown wary of attending leaders’ conferences, questioning whether they were truly necessary. His last G7, held in France, was also colored by acrimony when he argued with fellow leaders over whether Russia should be allowed back in.

This year, the White House didn’t confirm Trump would attend the G7 until relatively late in the spring. Eventually, however, he decided to rejoin the fold of the world’s top leaders.

“On the one hand, they’re disinclined and even averse to multilateralism,” said Welsh, the former NSC official who is now director of the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “On the other hand, the president very well looks like he enjoys being around wealthy people, around powerful people, and he likes to be the most important person in the room.”

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