The big story coming out of the G7 summit seems to be that other world leaders who are there to represent their own nations’ interests are shocked and appalled that President Trump seems to think he’s there to represent America’s interests. Here’s a round-up of what’s going on there, which should give you an idea of why Trump left early.
The leaders of the world’s richest countries have come together to smooth over their differences — especially with U.S. President Donald Trump — and to demonstrate they can still work together.
At the two-day meeting in La Malbaie, Quebec, the Group of Seven leaders are limping toward something that could look like a win, even if it comes far short of the broad communique signed by all attendees that typically comes out of their summits.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is proposing a forum — a “shared evaluation mechanism” — aimed at defusing the tensions with the U.S., and the idea has the backing of other European members. The idea has the backing of other European members, though it’s unclear if it will get U.S. support.
Low expectations for the meeting which ends Saturday could allow leaders to cast any consensus as an achievement, especially given that Trump and most of the other G-7 leaders headed into the talks appearing ready to fight. Trump spent the days leading up to the meeting tweeting complaints about the summit’s “indignant” host, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and French President Emmanuel Macron, arguing that both leaders refused to budge on their trade positions.
By the time he sat face-to-face with Macron on Friday, though, Trump was publicly heralding “progress” on the very issues he’d been grousing about. Instead of fighting big battles with Trump, his counterparts were angling for a baseline of agreement that might be as low as an acknowledgment of the important role of the G-7.
There were also no more references to Trump’s off-the-cuff remark on Friday about the need to bring Russian President Vladimir Putin back into the fold of the international community. The G-8 was downgraded back to a G-7 following Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The bid to gloss over the divide might see the reputation of the G-7 salvaged instead of becoming an unprecedented casualty of U.S. tariffs, disagreements over climate change and the future of the Iran deal. But it won’t solve the differences, particularly on trade, with the European Union moving toward retaliatory tariffs from July on key U.S. goods. The tit-for-tat risks a full blown trade war, something economists have said would be bad for all involved.
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It’s said that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Well, former President Bill Clinton just said that everyone should be hoping that President Trump is successful in his negotiations with North Korea…then later, when discussing foreign policy at a book promotion event, he said, “One of the things that gets you into bad decision-making is dehumanizing and underestimating your adversaries.” He wasn’t talking about his wife’s presidential campaign, but those two statements prove that he’s correct at least as often as a broken clock, and that’s higher than Hillary’s average. Maybe she and her campaign advisers should have listened to him.
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Major news that, for some reason, we’re not hearing much about in the media: for the first time ever, Iranian officials have admitted that they helped facilitate the 9/11 attack by secretly helping the hijackers travel freely. They gave the al-Qaeda operatives safe refuge in Iran and didn’t stamp their passports, to avoid drawing attention to them and to make it harder for outside authorities to trace their movements. Considering all the money we sent to Iran and the attempt to impose the Iran nuclear deal, this should be the lead story on every news outlet. But if you want more details, you might have to go here:
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