‘An awkward family gathering’: Trump and G7 leaders convene in France amid geopolitical divergences
By Kevin Liptak, Alayna Treene, CNN
Geneva, Switzerland (CNN) — For weeks, President Donald Trump and his advisers have looked ahead warily to this week’s Group of Seven summit in France.
Overseeing a Middle East war stuck in a dangerous limbo between ceasefire and full-blown conflict, Trump risked arriving to the lakeside resort of Évian-les-Bains without a deal and under scrutiny from some of the world’s most powerful people.
Instead, Trump will touch down Monday eager to trumpet the accord he announced over the weekend that appears to end hostilities with Iran for now and, in the president’s telling, reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump had wanted to enter the summit of leading industrialized nations in a position of strength and with an agreement in hand, sources say. And after months of conflict and negotiations that drew immense skepticism from his fellow G7 leaders, he’ll now get that — albeit with significant, lingering questions about the specifics of the agreement and the extent to which each side will abide by it.
The Iran war had already been expected to dominate discussions this week among the leaders, each of whom was forced to confront higher energy prices as a result of the strait’s prolonged closure. Over the last several months, Trump lashed out at nearly all of them for their reluctance to help patrol the key waterway, making for an awkward backdrop to this week’s gathering.
Ahead of the summit, officials from four of the G7 countries said that how to move ahead in the Middle East — even with an agreement in place — would undoubtedly provide fodder for intense discussions behind the closed doors of the Belle Époque Hôtel Royal in Évian.
Trump plans to press the leaders to help in the strait now that an agreement is in place, according to officials. France and Britain have both said they would form a coalition to help open the waterway once the conflict ended, including the removal of mines laid by Iran over the course of the war.
On Tuesday, the leaders of three Arab states — Egypt, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — will also join for talks, invited by French President Emmanuel Macron to help home in on the thorny questions affecting their region. Trump will meet them individually as well.
Macron also asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to attend in an effort to cajole the G7 to agree on support for Kyiv and the need for negotiations to end Russia’s war, now in its fifth year. Trump spent much of his first year back in office trying unsuccessfully to broker an agreement between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But he rarely discusses that conflict anymore as Iran consumes his attention, and European officials are eager to ascertain whether Trump is willing to apply new pressure on Putin.
Trump’s aides said discussions over coordination in the Strait of Hormuz, economic growth, supply chain resilience, legal immigration and artificial intelligence would all drive his conversations at this week’s summit. Officials from other G7 governments described similar agendas, but added China, the Ebola crisis in Africa and digital safety as potential points of conversation.
One US official said Trump planned to “reframe” discussions around development at the summit to focus on investment partnerships that would benefit both recipient nations and those providing the funds.
Trump’s long-standing skepticism of G7 summits
American officials have been frank, however, that the president is not approaching the summit with any particular goal in mind, and the administration is not expecting any large announcements or deliverables to emerge.
“It’s all really just a big photo op,” a senior White House official said. “It’s not like big things get done there. It’s more about the meetings that come after.”
The official said the summit could set the scene for more substantial conversations and dealmaking down the line. And some European officials also said they viewed the gathering as a precursor for another major summit — of NATO leaders in Turkey in early July — that many of them expect could prove contentious.
Trump has never been a particular fan of attending G7 summits. In his first term, he consistently questioned advisers whether his presence was necessary, and wondered what could be accomplished without the presence of countries like Russia and China.
Every summit he’s attended has, in some way, gone awry.
He abruptly cut short his time at two summits in Canada — one during his first term in the northern woods of Quebec and one last year in Alberta. Attending his first G7 in 2017 on the rocky coast of Sicily, he seemed to feel fellow leaders were ganging up on him by trying to convince him to remain in the Paris climate accord (some aides believed the pressure pushed him to withdraw from the agreement more quickly than he might have otherwise).
The last time Macron hosted the summit, in 2019, a dinner beneath the Biarritz lighthouse grew heated when Trump demanded Russia be readmitted into the alliance after being ejected following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Over their plates of Basque tuna, Trump’s fellow leaders offered little support for the idea.
Five years and a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine later, Trump opened last year’s G7 by issuing the same demand.
Max Bergmann, the program director for Europe at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, likened the summit to an “awkward family gathering … where you have to go to your in-laws and there’s an uncle that you don’t quite like.”
“No one wants to have a confrontation, even if things get quite passive aggressive at times,” Bergmann said. “But there’s always the possibility that things might snap, and it might get rather dramatic.”
From UFC accommodations to Versailles invites: How France has tried to keep Trump engaged
Planning this year’s summit, French officials looked first and foremost to ensure Trump stuck it out after he cut short his stay in Kananaskis in Canada last year. For Évian, the French have taken no chances. The dates of the gathering were shifted by a few days to accommodate Trump’s plans to host a UFC fight at the White House on his birthday.
And Macron — who has endured a hot-and-cold relationship with Trump for almost a decade — invited the US leader to a dinner at the gilded Palace of Versailles, outside Paris, on Wednesday evening as the summit ends.
Expectations for concrete outcomes are so low that organizers say there will be no joint communiqué signed by all leaders, as was once customary at G7 meetings. Instead, leaders are set to endorse a set of ad hoc declarations on issues including critical minerals, health and the protection of children online.
It’s a measure of how little convergence there is between Trump and his fellow G7 leaders on the most pressing geopolitical issues. While Iran and the ongoing war in Ukraine will be discussed, any conclusions will be reflected in a statement by the French presidency. The same solution was adopted by Canada ahead of last year’s G7.
Despite the obvious rifts, this year’s French hosts insisted the meeting amounted to a victory even before it began, making an early distinction between the two sets of topics that will be discussed.
“This Évian summit is, for us, already a success, in the sense that we have two categories of issues to address: substantive issues, which are truly very structural in nature and shape the international agenda, and current events and crises, which, by definition, require greater flexibility and cannot be fully anticipated in advance,” an official in the French presidency said. “On the substantive issues, this G7 summit is already a success.”
Meanwhile, the lakeside resort of Évian has transformed into a veritable fortress. A heavy police and military presence has contributed to the sense of siege being felt by many of the spa town’s residents.
“We have a lot of people who come by car to buy their bread,” said Delphine, who runs a bakery in town.
“Buying bread is not essential, and to cross the roadblocks you need an essential reason. I don’t think it’s going to be very pleasant, honestly. That being said, they’re just there to do their job. You can’t host seven presidents who are that important without security, but it’s a very unusual situation.”
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CNN’s Elina Baudier Kim, Melissa Bell, Paula Newton and Sebastian Shukla contributed to this report.
