Trump’s behavior at summit draws strong reaction in G-7 nations
Donald Trump’s actions at this past weekend’s Group of Seven meeting prompted a harsh reaction from newspaper editorial editors in the allied nations. Here’s a sampling, drawn from the websites of the newspapers and excerpts collected by Time magazine.
Canada The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Donald Trump’s decision to take his signature off the Charlevoix G-7 summit communique is one of the most flagrant manufactured crises ever perpetrated by an American administration against an ally. In its blatant duplicity, it is right up there with the Bush administration’s invented weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Canadians watching Trump and his officials, post-summit, insultingly call Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “dishonest and weak” and accuse him of stabbing the president in the back can rest assured that none of that is true.
Trump set an antagonistic tone for the summit by announcing, just prior to it, steep tariffs on Canadian and European steel and aluminum. He again raised the stakes on the first day of the summit when he said Russia should be readmitted into the informal group (it was expelled in 2014 after its illegal annexation of Crimea).
Relations between two of the world’s closest allies are now at a perilous low. The fault rests entirely with Trump and his advisers. Our government has been patient with the president and his protectionist agenda. So too have Canadians, but this is getting tiresome. We are a polite people, but the president will learn that, when roused, we don’t roll over at the request of an insulting bully, no matter how big.
The Halifax Chronicle Herald
It takes both statecraft and stagecraft to put on a successful international summit. Statecraft happens behind the scenes and the outline of the final communique often is set before the opening speeches.
Stagecraft is created for political audiences: leaders pose for photos, participate in choreographed discussions and theatrically sign an agreed-upon final communique. The whole thing is carried off in a spirit of dignified bonhomie.
No more. At the chaotic G-7 summit in Charlevoix, statecraft was overwhelmed by the bombastic stagecraft of U.S. President Donald Trump. The other G-7 countries spent the weekend trying to maintain order in the face of Trump’s recalcitrance. They tried to mollify him. They failed.
At Trump’s behest, a phrase reflecting the traditional G-7 priority on the need for a “rules-based international order” was deleted from the communique, which Trump refused to endorse anyway.
Having soured the pre-summit atmosphere by tweeting insults and inflammatory trade claims at Canada, Trump revealed in Charlevoix that his anti-canadian steel and aluminum tariffs are really about milk quotas, not U.S. national security.
The president skipped a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May and was so late for one with President Emmanuel Macron of France that it had to be rescheduled. He also arrived pointedly late for a session on gender equality.
Then Trump left the summit four hours early to fly to Singapore for his much-hyped meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. From Air Force One, Trump sent a series of tweets castigating Trudeau for, well, standing up for Canada.
But the crowning moment of Trump madness came when he suggested that Russia should be re-admitted to the G-7. “Why are we having a meeting without Russia?” Trump wondered. “Russia should be in the meeting.”
It was a remarkable intervention, given that Trump’s administration is embroiled in probes about Russian meddling in U.S. elections. The fact is other G-7 nations don’t want Vladimir Putin around because he’s a security risk. Russia is a fading power. It’s not a top-10 economy and spreads its influence more by corruption than by example. After invading Ukraine and the Crimea and meddling in Western internal politics, Russia’s G-7 days are properly over.
The Toronto Sun
Hollywood elite Robert De Niro created a lot of buzz at the Tony Awards for telling the world to “F*** Trump,” and then got more headlines opening a restaurant in Toronto by apologizing for his president’s behavior.
De Niro can afford to be a Hollywood elitist because he has more money than he knows what to do with — which is why he is opening another restaurant.
We, on the other hand, don’t.
What we need is a prime minister who does not go out of his way to yank the chain of a mercurial president of the United States who will use any excuse to be offended and therefore derail and hopes of solidifying a mutually advantageous North American Free Trade Agreement.
All the name calling that went on over the weekend is not worth getting overly hyped up or thin-skinned sensitive.
It is just Trump being Trump.
The Toronto Star
“Dishonest.” “Amateurish.” “Bad faith.” “Betrayal.”
Donald Trump and his advisers threw all these insults and more at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canada.
But the reality is that every one of them applies not to Trudeau but to Trump himself.
This meeting was doomed from the start, given that Trump chose to impose stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum on Canada and the European Union on the eve of the annual summit. And then topped that off as soon as he landed in Quebec with an out-of-nowhere call for Russia to be readmitted to the group.
He sulked his way through the first part of the meeting, gave his delegation the OK to sign the summit’s pallid final communique, then threw a hissy fit and tore it up as soon as he was back on Air Force One.
It was both dishonest and amateurish. Trump accused Canada and the other G-7 allies of imposing “unacceptable” tariffs on American goods.
This is an almost entirely fake issue. Canada has some high tariffs in a few areas, such as dairy, which Trump is obsessing about. But the average tariffs imposed by Britain, France and Germany, according to the World Bank, are just 1.6 percent.incanada’scase,it’s 0.8percent.
Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t want to know. He chose to make up his own facts and mix them in with gratuitous insults aimed at the United States’ closest and most dependable allies.
His chief economic adviser, Lawrence Kudlow, let the cat out of the bag when he made it clear that Trump was lashing out at Trudeau not because of anything the prime minister said or did, but because he didn’t want to look weak on the eve of his meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore.
Germany
In Der Spiegel, a commentator wrote: “The G-7 debacle shows the real problem with Donald Trump’s politics is Donald Trump. His behavior follows no order, no logic, instead just the desire to be the best, most important and biggest. The collapse of the West, the destruction of decades of friendship is simply a product of his unprecedented ego trips.”
France Le Monde
One thing is clear: the president of the United States, Donald Trump, is better disposed to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, a man whose dynasty has locked his country and his people into a megalomaniac madness, than to his European, Japanese and Canadian allies. This kind of behavior has no precedent in the practice of diplomacy between allies. The Europeans must learn lessons from it now.
Japan Japan Times
If U.S. President Donald Trump’s objective is to make himself the center of attention at every international event, he is succeeding. If he aims to undermine the legitimacy of international institutions, he is making progress. If, however, he seeks to make America great again, his actions are working at cross purposes to his goal. Those are the inescapable conclusions to be drawn from last weekend’s Group of Seven leaders summit.
Trump’s determination to go his own way against mounting opposition is taking a toll. Opinion polls show that U.S. standing in the world is deteriorating. Even before Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and threatened trade wars, a Gallup survey showed median approval of U.S. leadership dropped 18 points in Trump’s first year, to a record low of just 30 percent. A Pew Research Center survey last year revealed that global public assessment of Trump was below that of President Barack Obama in all but two countries: Russia and Israel.
Picking fights with friends is not making America great again. Rather, it is weakening the foundation of American power, a development that none of its allies and partners wish to see. It is also helping governments that prefer a world ruled by raw power and indifference to the aspirations of democracy and the dignity of its inhabitants. It is a world in which we are all diminished.
The Asahi Shimbum
Japan could end up lagging behind the radical changes occurring in the landscape of international relations if (Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe continues to maintain a foreign policy agenda fully dependent on the Trump White House. Abe should confront and act on the obvious fact that Japan cannot protect its own interests by simply following the United States.
The U.K. The Guardian
The U.S. is the cornerstone of the post1945 international order. If Donald Trump wishes to remove that cornerstone, everything else is threatened. That has not yet happened. The thankless task of doing what can be done to mitigate Trumpian disruption must continue. But a fissure is growing. And it got wider in Quebec.
Daily Telegraph
There is something to be said for his refusal to subscribe to the conventional diplomatic niceties. Invariably, final communiques are couched in bland terms to cover up differences that always exist between participants. Donald Trump decided to make those apparent rather than pretend otherwise.
On the other hand, one point of these meetings is to present a united approach on behalf of the economically developed democratic nations whose shared outlook and values frame the very concept of what has come to be known as “the West.” Trump’s somewhat petulant and disruptive behaviour in Quebec calls into question whether such a political construct can be said to exist any longer under the current U.S. president.
The Irish Times
The juxtaposition between the Trump who landed in Singapore and the one who attended the G-7 summit in Quebec at the weekend was striking. On the eve of his meeting with Kim, the U.S. president radiated energy and optimism. At the G-7 summit at the weekend, Trump was sour, surly and offensive. He appeared to be more comfortable about the prospect of meeting a brutal dictator than a gathering of democratic allies.
In time, the Quebec G-7 may be seen as the point at which the chasm between Trump’s America and its western allies became unbridgeable. The summit was a fiasco. On the eve of his arrival, Trump said Russia should be allowed back into the group. He arrived late for meetings, refused to compromise on trade, disparaged other leaders and left early. He then repudiated the joint communique in an angry tirade on Twitter.
It’s easy to dismiss such behaviour as just more Trumpian posturing. But something much more profound is taking place. Under Trump, the U.S. is breaking with its western allies on a range of key policy issues, from climate and trade to the Middle East. Trump is openly hostile to the post-war order that the U.S. was instrumental in establishing. If there were any U.S. allies who still clung to the hope that the U.S. president could be maneuvered back to the mainstream, the failure of the G-7 in Quebec was a salutary lesson.
United States The Weekly Standard conservative political magazine
“I know the smartest negotiators in the world. I know the good ones. I know the bad ones. I know the overrated ones. You get a lot of them that are overrated. They’re not good. They think they are. They get good stories, because the newspapers get buffaloed. But they’re not good . ... Believe me, folks. We will do very, very well — very, very well.”
That was, of course, Donald Trump announcing his presidential candidacy in June of 2015. The word negotiate and its cognates peppered that speech, and indeed his presidential campaign. It was Trump’s biggest, most important, and most often-repeated promise: He would negotiate better deals for the United States. Many voters who plumped for him over Hillary Clinton did so precisely because they thought he was the great negotiator.
We are prepared to accept the possibility that a truly great negotiator may from time to time say things in public that upset or even scandalize the public. But it’s impossible to see what the U.S. gains by lashing out at Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau simply because he expressed unhappiness with U.S. tariffs in a press conference in his own country, and at almost the same time suggesting that the world’s most aggressive supporter of terrorism and rogue regimes — Russia — should be let back into the G-7. Russia was ejected from the G-8 (as it then was) in 2014 after its annexation of Crimea.
Not only were the criticisms of Trudeau pointless. They rallied American allies against the U.S. just as Trump heads into a potentially far more consequential summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jongun.
New York Times
When Vladimir Putin ordered his hackers to surreptitiously help Donald Trump in the presidential race, he could hardly have anticipated that once in office, Trump would so outrageously, destructively and thoroughly alienate America’s closest neighbors and allies as he did at the Group of 7 meeting in Canada. The lame explanation from Trump’s courtiers, that he needed to look tough for his meeting with Kim Jong Un, made matters worse by implying that he felt he needed to publicly kick friends aside to impress a murderous dictator.
Nations represented at the meeting — and especially Canada, whose prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was personally insulted in a way defying basic social norms — reacted with horror and dismay. International diplomacy cannot be conducted by “fits of anger,” said President Emmanuel Macron of France, whom Trump recently embraced in Washington. “In a matter of seconds, you can destroy trust with 280 Twitter characters,” said the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas. Editorials were less restrained: “When roused, we don’t roll over at the request of an insulting bully, no matter how big,” hissed Canada’s Globe and Mail.
Indeed, the Group of 7 was just the kind of forum a bully like Trump cannot abide, not out of geopolitical considerations, but because he cannot dominate and preen. He knew he would be on the defensive — over backing out of the Paris environment accord and the Iran nuclear deal, and now over the tariffs he slapped on European and Canadian steel and aluminum — so he made a point of being late, acting petulant, leaving early and lashing out at Trudeau.
The Houston Chronicle
While this makeshift G-6 plus 1 struggles to stand together, Trump can’t even stand up for his own destructive trade policies. He left the meeting early rather than be confronted in person by his geopolitical peers.
Meanwhile, this unnecessary fight makes it all the more difficult to confront the true trade menace: China.
The Asian nation has the largest trade surplus with the United States and routinely flouts the international trade rules that the other G-7 nations regularly abide by. If Trump were serious about confronting China, he would be working to unite the G-7 and present a solid front in global affairs. He would sign the Trans-pacific Partnership, restart negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and ensure that the United States, not China, sits at the core of global trade.
Instead, he’s offered a hand to China by lifting crippling sanctions on ZTE, a Chinese telecom company caught doing business with Iran and North Korea.
For as long as Trump holds the White House, our allies must resist his attempts to rend a U.s.-centric international order that we spent a century building. Because the meeting in Quebec this weekend wasn’t the G-7. It wasn’t even the G-6 plus 1. It was the G-6 plus Trump. Let us hope the alliance that won the Cold War survives until it can be restitched whole again.