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A tired but upbeat President Trump found common ground with fellow Group of Seven leaders in France last week, gaining their support for his Iran peace deal and lending his to a joint declaration to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia. At the first session, Trump stood at the head of the table and jokingly declared, “I’m the boss,” before ceding the floor to French President Emmanuel Macron, who was hosting the summit in the Alpine town of Évian-les-Bains. Meeting cordially with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump suggested the U.S. might reintroduce sanctions on Russian oil. But he also indicated that the Ukraine war wasn’t a major U.S. priority, saying it “has no impact on us, other than we sell weapons,” and adding, “we’re thousands of miles away.”
U.S. relations with fellow G-7 members—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K.—have been strained over Trump’s threats against allies’ sovereignty and demands that they support his Iran war, but G-7 leaders made great efforts to keep the president happy. In a joint statement, they praised Trump’s “strong leadership” in securing the Iran deal. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose recent criticism of the Iran war spurred Trump to pull some U.S. troops from Germany, gave him a soccer jersey with the number 47, and said, “We’re on the same team.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who had sharply criticized Trump’s recent broadsides against Pope Leo XIV, was seen chatting with the U.S. president at the summit. Asked if she and Trump were friends again, she said, “We have always been friends.”
What the columnists said
“For all the sharp elbows” of the past year, G-7 leaders have decided “the best way to deal with a disruptive president is to court him,” said Mark Landler in The New York Times. At last year’s summit in Canada, Trump departed early, accusing the others of making a “big mistake” by ousting Russia from the group in 2014. This time it was all flattery, and Trump was in a better mood. Macron even bestowed a rare honor on Trump, inviting him to dine at the opulent Palace of Versailles. “Versailles is not a gold leaf,” Trump said appreciatively. “Versailles is the real deal.”
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Among the G-7 leaders, “the sense of relief was palpable,” said Nicholas Vinocur in Politico. Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer even offered military support to help the U.S. open the Strait of Hormuz, the oil transit corridor Iran had closed off, in exchange for Trump backing their resolution to support Ukraine. The goodwill has raised hopes that, with a critical NATO summit coming up next month, Trump can be kept “firmly inside the camp of Western powers.”
The bar is pretty low at these events these days, said Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Dan Diamond in The Washington Post. Success is defined “by the absence of rupture.” As Max Bergmann of the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it, “Getting the United States to just be, in some ways, normal and having this come across as a relatively routine summit—that’s the win.”
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