Donald Trump is not the only threat facing the G7

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Konrad Yakabuski is a columnist for The Globe and Mail.

If you remember anything at all about last year’s Group of Seven summit, chances are it involves neither the location of the annual gathering of the leaders of the world’s advanced industrialized democracies nor the contents of the meeting’s final communiqué.

Coverage of the summit held in Italy’s Apulia region was dominated by viral videos that appeared to show then U.S. president Joe Biden wandering off as other G7 leaders watched a skydiving demonstration. The videos were dismissed at the time by Mr. Biden’s press secretary as “cheap fakes.” But they would end up playing a role in the 46th U.S. president’s downfall. Only days after the summit, Mr. Biden delivered the catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump that would lead to his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.

The Biden drama aside, the Apulia summit was actually a big success. The G7 leaders presented a united front in support for Ukraine, and they came together to denounce China’s “enabling” of Russia’s war machine. Their final communiqué included a hard-won agreement to use future proceeds on seized Russian assets to fund Ukraine and issued a tough rebuke of China’s industrial overcapacity and unfair trade practices.

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“In some ways, the Biden administration was a high point for the G7,” says Creon Butler, director of the Global Economy and Finance Program at British think tank Chatham House and a former G7 adviser to British prime ministers David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. “One of the things that made it so effective during the previous U.S. administration was the scale of the external threat to which the G7 was responding.”

A year after the Apulia summit, the primary menace facing the G7 may well be an internal one. Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has even summit veterans such as Mr. Butler uncertain about the group’s future. Though the G7 managed to bounce back after being paralyzed during Mr. Trump’s first term in office between 2017 and 2021, it is unclear whether it can survive the U.S. President’s second stint in the Oval Office.

As Prime Minister Mark Carney prepares to host his fellow G7 leaders at Kananaskis, Alta., beginning on Sunday, no one is sure just how Mr. Trump will act. The mercurial U.S. President cannot be counted on to play by any of the unwritten rules of G7 diplomacy.

“My expectations for any international event in which Donald Trump is involved are under control,” says Atlantic Council distinguished fellow Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland who served as a senior U.S. National Security Council official under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “The G7 summit has a lot of issues it ought to be addressing, but the first thing people will look at is what Trump will do, what bombshells will he lay out.”

This is more than a mere matter of political optics.

American engagement is critical to the G7’s ability to address the collective challenges facing the world’s advanced industrial democracies. The three G7 summits held during Mr. Trump’s first term – the 2020 meeting was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic – failed to produce any meaningful breakthroughs as the United States pursued its own agenda on climate change and trade. This was glaringly evident at the 2018 summit, held in Quebec’s Charlevoix region, which unravelled after Mr. Trump withdrew U.S. support for the final communiqué. Piqued by then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s criticism of the U.S. president’s move to invoke national security to slap tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, Mr. Trump responded with a tweet calling Mr. Trudeau “dishonest & weak.”

The iconic photo that emerged from the 2018 summit – showing the U.S. president, seated with arms crossed, encircled by other leaders in what looked like an intervention – encapsulated the dysfunction that plagued the G7 during Mr. Trump’s first term. He thwarted a bid to strengthen a G7 commitment to uphold the rules of the world trading system. Instead, he left the summit early and headed for Singapore for a tête-à-tête with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, as if to underscore his upside-down world view.

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“It became pretty clear after time that there were very few things, with respect to the core beliefs of the G7, that Mr. Trump shared,” says Mr. Butler, who attended the Charlevoix summit as Ms. May’s top G7 adviser. “The problem with where we are now compared to the previous Trump administration is that – if you look at the things the President has said about Canada and territorial integrity, and the way he approaches tariffs, the way his administration has campaigned in European elections – all of this undermines trust.”

Enter Mr. Carney, who inherited the thankless task of presiding over the first summit since Mr. Trump’s second inauguration. Less than six months into his second term, the U.S. President has arguably done more to subvert the rules-based international order than during his entire first mandate. Given the 2018 experience, observers say Mr. Carney will be lucky to get through the summit without a major incident derailing it. Keeping Mr. Trump in line will require deft stickhandling by the Canadian PM on the thorniest issues.

“Mr. Carney won’t want a situation similar to the previous Canadian summit,” Mr. Butler says. “But that leaves the question of whether there is really important stuff they can’t talk about with Mr. Trump.”

It also raises doubts about Mr. Carney’s hopes for using the summit as a launching pad for his ambitious new foreign-policy agenda, one that asserts Canada’s independence from the U.S. “Canada is ready to build a coalition of like-minded countries that share its values, that believe in international cooperation and the free and open exchange of goods, services and ideas,” the government said in its May 27 Throne Speech. “Canada is ready to lead. This will be demonstrated in June, when Canada convenes the G7 Summit.”

Those words seemed to be a rebuke of Mr. Trump’s unilateralist and mercantilist approach. Mr. Carney must nevertheless walk a fine line. Not only do Canada’s own interests depend on reaching a new economic and security arrangement with the United States – a deal Mr. Carney had hoped to conclude before the June 15-17 summit – the usefulness of the G7 hinges on maintaining U.S. support for the institution.

“Keeping Mr. Trump in the conversation has more positives than negatives,” says Université de Montréal political-science professor, Frédéric Mérand. “The alternative is bilateral relations in which every country except the United States stands to lose.”

Despite the challenges Mr. Trump poses, the G7 is arguably more important than ever as a venue for collective problem solving. The G20 and United Nations Security Council remain deadlocked as the intensifying U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry and Russia’s war in Ukraine sap trust among member countries.

“The G7 remains more coherent and cohesive” than the G20 or UNSC, Prof. Mérand says. “The final communiqué often doesn’t have much to do with what goes on behind closed doors. The communiqué can be plain vanilla, but the discussions can be very productive.”

Indeed, the G7 summit’s informal structure is part of what makes it so valuable. Discussions among leaders can be free flowing; there are no restrictive procedural rules to limit what does and does not get talked about; the intimate nature of the gathering encourages a sense of camaraderie among the leaders.

Mr. Fried hopes that, in spite of Mr. Trump’s unpredictable behaviour, the atmosphere in Kananaskis will be conducive to making progress on ending the war in Ukraine and Mr. Trump’s tariff war on U.S. allies. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who will participate in the summit, this week put forward a proposal to lower the price cap on Russian oil to US$45 from US$60. The cap was initially imposed by the G7 in 2022 to limit Russian oil revenues. But declining world crude prices have since undermined the cap’s effectiveness. Mr. Fried says the G7 leaders should not only adopt Ms. von der Leyen’s proposal but attempt to revive peace efforts.

“If I were advising the European leaders, particularly [British prime minister Keir] Starmer, [French President Emmanuel] Macron and [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merz, I would urge them to work on Trump to convince him that he can use the G7 to put pressure on Russia to embrace Trump’s own peace plan,” says Mr. Fried, referring to the U.S. administration’s April proposal for a permanent ceasefire accompanied by security guarantees – short of NATO membership – for Ukraine.

Still, it will be up to Mr. Carney, as summit host, to gauge how much time should be taken up by the Ukraine war, at the expense of other issues. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will attend the summit. But Mr. Carney, who has wholly embraced the recent convention of including non-G7 members in summit proceedings, has also invited Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and, reportedly, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (MBS will not be attending.) Each non-G7 leader will seek to emphasize his or her own priorities, broadening the scope of issues on the agenda.

The push to invite ever more non-G7 leaders to join selected G7 discussions comes as the G7’s share of global gross domestic product continues to decline – from about 70 per cent three decades ago to around 43 per cent in 2024, in nominal terms. As a group, the G7 no longer has the heft to defuse global problems on its own the way it once did.

Criticism that the G7 is too Eurocentric and unrepresentative of the 21st century global order has also led to calls to expand its formal membership to other democratic countries. During his first term, Mr. Trump appeared to get behind a proposal to replace the G7 with a D10, by including India, South Korea and Australia in the club – though he made his support conditional on also reintegrating Russia back into the fold. (Russia was ousted from what had been the G8 after Mr. Putin’s 2014 seizure of Crimea.)

A 2024 Center for Strategic and International Studies report made the case for adding Australia and South Korea to create a G9. “The current pace of change in world affairs requires a bending of existing institutions to meet the challenges of global governance. As a grouping of like-minded, advanced industrial democracies, the G7 is the only institution today that can step into this role,” the Washington-based think tank’s report said. “[A]ny new members must support the G7’s mission, share its political values, be responsible stewards of the global economy and have the capabilities, commitment and, importantly, the trust of other G7 members. Australia and South Korea … easily meet this bar.”

Though he is not opposed to a modest expansion of the G7, Mr. Fried suggests any further enlargement to include more democratic countries could lead existing members to regroup in other ways. “If you abolished the G7 in the name of greater inclusivity, you would only end up having to re-establish it [informally] anyway,” he says.

Even without expansion, the G7 is evolving as political developments within member countries change the group’s internal dynamics. That was clear at last year’s Apulia summit, hosted by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a leading figure of the European populist right. Though Ms. Meloni stood with other G7 leaders on the Ukraine war and China’s trade practices, she vetoed Mr. Macron’s push to include a defence of abortion rights in the final communiqué and ensured the document included a commitment to step up G7 efforts to counter irregular migration.

The rise of populist parties in other G7 countries is bound to be reflected in the group’s proceedings in Alberta. Centrist leaders such as Mr. Starmer, Mr. Macron and Mr. Merz are being forced to adapt to growing far-right representation in their respective parliaments. With that and 2018 in mind, Mr. Carney must try to ensure the Kananaskis summit, the first with both Mr. Trump and Ms. Meloni in attendance, does not get remembered for all the wrong reasons.