This year’s G7 meeting has now come and gone, and the biggest outcome, besides some classic Trumpian dissembling, was a $20-million fund to help fight the Amazon fires. Ugh. But the venue was lovely.
By now, the discord at, and still larger discord surrounding, the latest G7 leaders’ meeting should be obvious to everyone from statements and some telling images that have been generated for all eternity. Much of the discord must be laid directly at the feet of US President Donald Trump. He is already on record as believing such things as G7 meetings, and most multilateral meetings more generally, are largely a waste of his very valuable time; time that could presumably be better spent fixating on the broadcast rants available on Fox News, or in curating his own, increasingly unhinged, Twitter feed.
The heads of government from the US, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy, and this year’s host, France, met this past weekend and on into Monday at a splashy resort hotel on the coast of south-western France in the town of Biarritz, using the luxurious palace built by Napoleon III for his wife, Eugenie. This G7 meeting is a yearly event, rotated around the attendees’…
