Donald J. Trump looks to have saved the worst for last in his lengthy first trip abroad as US president: a Group-of-Seven (G-7) summit that will involve debates on climate change and free trade with leaders who would probably rather be dealing with his predecessor.
From a red carpet visit to Saudi Arabia Trump described as “beyond anything anyone has seen”, the US president had a first encounter with America’s traditional European allies at a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) on Thursday, where he told them they’d undershot what they “owed” to the alliance by $119 billion and must pay more.
On Friday he was to sit down with a smaller group of rich democracies for a two-day encounter long on the multilateral policy debates Trump doesn’t like and short on the kinds of concrete arms-for-investment deals struck in Saudi Arabia that can provide gratifying wins to take home. Yet the leaders are likely to do all they can to avoid a public confrontation.
Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, hosting the summit at the foot of Sicily’s Mount Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, has focused the event on what everyone around the table can agree to: the need to fight terrorism. A special joint declaration on terror is being drafted in response to this week’s bombing of a concert in the UK, according to an Italian official involved in the preparations.
Japan, meanwhile, hopes to secure language on the need to rein in North Korea’s missile tests, said an official with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s delegation. That’s another issue on which all seven nations can easily agree.
Security focus
The focus on security should push more contentious policy areas, such as trade and climate change into the background, said Jeremy Shapiro, a former US State Department official now at the Brussels-based European Council on Foreign Relations. According to a French official involved in the preparations, the other leaders will try hard to persuade the president not to follow up on his threat to pull the US out of the 2015 Paris accords to reduce global warming, but avoid any six-against-one face-off.
“They aren’t going to gang up on him,” Shapiro said. “Maybe in a year or two, but not now when he has changed his mind on so many things and they think they may be able to turn him on climate change”.
On Wednesday US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Trump would make a decision on the Paris accords only after the summit in Sicily, a delay that would defuse a potentially explosive issue and create an opportunity for persuasion.
1981 precedent
This isn’t the first time the arrival of a radically different US president has tested the club’s unity, according to John Kirton, director of the G-7 and G-8 Research Group, at the University of Toronto, recalling Ronald Reagan’s first such summit in 1981, in Canada.
Then, too, the other G-7 leaders saw the new US leader of the free world “as on the far right, with little experience in foreign affairs”, said Kirton—someone “who believed in the magic of the market place and that America would ride tall again in the saddle after the defeatism and weakness of his Democratic predecessor”.
In the event, the expected fireworks failed to ignite. Reagan was in listening mode and against expectation agreed to attend a later United Nations event on the equivalent issue of the day to climate change: whether the rich north should aid poorer countries in the south.
Imposing sanctions
Yet this year’s meeting is unusual for the number of core issues on which the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US won’t just be rubber-stamping language settled beforehand by lower level officials. That’s largely because the US either disagrees or hasn’t yet settled on a position, three European officials said. All asked not to be named so they could discuss the behind-the-scenes preparations.
An April meeting of G-7 energy ministers failed to produce any statement on climate change, due to US opposition. Earlier this month, the group’s finance ministers had to fudge language opposing protectionism in trade, again due to US objections. On both issues, the US has found itself in a minority of one within the club of economically developed democracies. That weakness may carry through into the summit conclusions.
If this week’s summit passes as uneventfully as in 1981, that shouldn’t be too reassuring, according to Shapiro. That’s because like other presidents before him, Trump’s initial preoccupation with domestic issues is likely to move to foreign affairs, where the White House has more power to act. At that point, the switches Trump has made to more mainstream positions on questions, such as Nato’s continued relevance, Russian expansion, and declaring China a currency manipulator, could be as “whimsically’’ overturned again.
Reagan’s second summit is generally considered the least successful in G-7 history and could provide a cautionary tale. It descended into acrimony over US opposition to proposals by the Soviet Union to build gas pipelines to Western Europe. The US followed up by imposing sanctions that affected some of its G-7 allies.