A rchive Date
[ 28-06-2025 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-glavin-trump-didnt-belong-at-g7
Trump didn't belong at G7
Carney remains deathly afraid of the American president's tariff trigger-finger
By Terry Glavin Jun 18, 2025
With the conclusion of the G7 gathering in Kananaskis on Tuesday, it’s an open question whether the session was merely unproductive or downright counterproductive, but there’s one proposition that’s difficult to dispute, and it’s this. It would have been better had U.S. President Donald Trump been invited to stay away.
The kindest explanation for the supine and obsequious postures adopted in Trump’s presence, most noticeably by Prime Minister Mark Carney and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is that they’re both deathly afraid of the irrational and ill-tempered American president’s tariff trigger-finger.
It may even be the case that Carney’s flattering tone in Kananaskis will encourage Trump to fold the trade war he’s been waging on Canada within what Carney called a new “economic and security partnership” between Canada and the U.S. in negotiations within the next 30 days. It’s not clear whether this partnership will include Canada’s protection under Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome,” which would cost Canadians $61 billion unless Canada became the 51st American state.
As for Starmer, he appears to have obtained further assurances about the contents of a tentative tariff and quota deal the U.S. and the United Kingdom concluded last month, which Trump mistakenly called a U.S. agreement with the European Union. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was not so lucky. Ishiba left for home with no progress in persuading Trump to drop his crippling 25 percent tariffs on Japanese automobile imports.
Apart from that sort of thing and some commitments to cooperate on trans-national repression, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, migrant smuggling and wildfires, much has been made of a 121-word G7 statement about Israel’s ongoing Operation Rising Lion.
The operation is the closest thing to all-out war between Iran and Israel in the nearly half-century of Iran’s terror campaign against the Jewish state. Determined to smash Iran’s nuclear-bomb aspirations once and for all, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is in the seventh day of an audacious drone-and-missile assault on the Khomeinist regime.
So far, Israel has crippled several of Iran’s nuclear sites, knocked out much of Iran’s air defence and missile-launching infrastructure and liquidated several key figures in Iran’s ruling military establishment.
The G7 statement notices that Israel has the right to defend itself and that Iran is the principal source of the region’s instability and terror, and further asserts that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. This is all quite uncontroversial, or should be. Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, which prohibits the development of nuclear weapons, which Iran appears to have been attempting, on the sly, for years.
The Israeli operation was put in motion against the backdrop of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency finding last week of “serious and growing concerns” that Iran has not been straight with IAEA inspectors since at least 2019. Iran has repeatedly failed to demonstrate that it wasn’t diverting nuclear material for a clandestine nuclear-bomb program, the IAEA reported.
As for Russia’s war on Ukraine, that global catastrophe barely got a look-in. There was no G7 statement dealing with Vladimir Putin’s war or his threats to Europe, and the big controversy about that was merely about whether the Trump administration had scuttled a draft statement or whether Carney’s government hadn’t even bothered to formulate a statement that Trump, whose pleadings on behalf of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin go back several years, could be persuaded to sign.
Trump left halfway through the summit anyway, ostensibly to focus on the Israel-Iran conflict. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t bother to stick around either, and it was just as well. All Ukraine got was a handful of passing mentions in Carney’s “chair’s summary” to the effect that the G7 supports the idea of “a strong and sovereign Ukraine” and that Russia should match Ukraine’s commitment to an unconditional ceasefire. As if to soften the blow, Carney pledged a further $4.3 billion in military and reconstruction aid to Ukraine this week, along with more sanctions targeting Russia’s “shadow fleet” of dodgy oil tankers.
And then there was this: “G7 Leaders expressed support for President Trump’s efforts to achieve a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”
This is a sentence that stoops below obsequiousness to outright self-abasement.
Trump’s “efforts” in this matter have consisted mainly in allowing himself to be conscripted as Vladimir Putin’s propaganda conduit, grossly exaggerating the Biden administration’s contribution to Ukraine, boasting about his good relations with Putin and generally sabotaging Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself in the bloodiest war in Europe since the Nazi era. Trump also says the war would never have happened had he been president instead of Joe Biden.
Trump’s hubris got the better of him again on Monday, with Carney standing at his side. Trump repeated his wish that the G7 had not expelled Putin in 2014, a move he attributed to former prime minister Justin Trudeau and former president Barack Obama. Trump also repeated his nonsense suggestion that Putin would not have gone to war if Russia had not been expelled from the G8 (for good measure, Trump suggested on Monday that China should be added to the G7’s membership).
In fact, it was former Prime Minister Stephen Harper who led the charge to expel Russia, more than a year before Trudeau came to power, and Russia’s ejection occurred after Putin invaded Donbas and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
Trump also claimed, again, that the U.S. had spent $350 billion on Ukraine’s war effort. This is roughly three times the true amount, and significantly less than the funds the Europeans and Canada have contributed in military, humanitarian and military aid. Just over the past two months, the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine support tracker shows that Europe has advanced $23 billion in aid to Ukraine, and the U.S. has contributed nothing.
To date, the sum total of Trump’s “peace talks” consists of a minerals profit-sharing arrangement with Ukraine intended to recover the cost of U.S. contributions to date, no U.S. security guarantees or commitment for future military aid, and “Crimea,” the main prize in Putin’s 2014 invasion, “will stay with Russia.”
Adding to Ukraine’s humiliation: While the heads of government of Canada, the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom were meeting in Kananaskis, Russia launched its deadliest drone attack on Kyiv this year, killing at least 18 people and wounding 151.
The swarms of Shahed drones Russia has been launching at civilian areas in Ukraine are an Iranian innovation. Lately they’ve been manufactured in North Korea.
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 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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