Emmanuel Macron, the host of the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, has framed an agenda to make it as palatable as possible to his guest of honour, but the French president has no idea if Donald Trump, a haphazard summit attender, will last the full three days – or disrupt the proceedings every hour he stays.
The US president quit the last G7 summit in Kananaskis, Canada, early to work on the Iran conflict, and this year, plus ça change, Iran may also draw presidential attention. For good measure, he insulted this summit’s host before leaving Canada last year, describing Macron as “publicity seeking” and adding: “Purposefully or not, Emmanuel Macron always gets it wrong.”
Macron, who will be attending his 10th G7 summit, chose not to take umbrage, and has even postponed the start of the summit to allow Trump to celebrate his 80th birthday with a UFC event on the White House lawn. Macron is holding out a dinner in Versailles on Wednesday night as a reward if Trump stays the three days; French officials say Trump adores the palace’s gold, and insist the two men respect each other.
It will be touch and go if Trump completes the summit. Reports out of Washington suggest the US president has not been in celebratory mood, and the temptation for him will be to insult his six fellow leaders – representing Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK – for lacking the loyalty to join his earlier plan to reopen the strait of Hormuz through force. At best, he will be demanding the planned Franco-British naval taskforce to enforce the restoration of freedom of navigation, as outlined in the US-Iran joint memorandum of understanding, moves quickly. De-mining is also urgently needed if the hundreds of tankers backed up in the strait are to reach the arteries of the world economy in time.
The other G7 leaders – all opposed to the Iran war, with the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, describing it as a US humiliation – will have to decide whether to look ahead, or pass verdict on a war that has upended the world economy.
Trump appears to be in a state of denial about the economic impact of the war. He told Fox News last week that oil prices had not risen as much as many predicted, adding: “You know what I really love. I love the inflation.”
The World Bank in a report on Thursday cut forecast world growth this year from 2.9% to 2.5%, taking growth to its lowest global level since the Covid pandemic. The Bank of Japan is expected to raise interest rates to a 31-year high, as wholesale prices have climbed at the fastest pace in three years. Europe’s central bank on Wednesday raised interest rates for the first time since 2023 amid fears of inflation going over 3% this year. The French central bank’s governor, Emmanuel Moulin, Macron’s former chief of staff, predicted “persistent” coming inflation. He may have noticed that container shipping rates have doubled since the start of the war, and are unlikely to decline soon.
The French foreign ministry says the world’s poorest will suffer most as fertiliser and food prices soar. Commodity prices are to rise 22%, the World Bank predicts, against the 7% fall expected at the start of the year. Chronic indebtedness will worsen as interest rates rise. This was happening, the World Bank pointed out, as international development aid was falling “and is expected to decline further, stripping away one of the last remaining buffers that countries depend on to sustain schools, health care, and food assistance programmes”.
Trump also faces being cornered by two other even more persistent wars – Ukraine and Gaza. Macron wants to see Europe given a greater role in solving both conflicts, pointing out it is Europe, not the US, that is saving Ukraine from bankruptcy.
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, is promoting the idea of an EU envoy for Ukraine – the Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, has been mentioned – but Macron is sceptical about the post. European credibility on defence has also been weakened by the failure of the Franco-German FCAS fighter-jet project, while the resignation of the UK defence secretary, John Healey, shows Britain’s fiscal problems.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy will attend on Tuesday, and recent progress on the battlefield means the Ukrainian president can remind Trump he did hold more cards than the US president thought. However, at the same time, Ukraine’s civilian death toll in May was the highest since the war began.
France will also be pressing for the US to resolve the impasse in Gaza over Hamas disarmament. Trump will meet leaders from Qatar, UAE and Egypt to discuss the crisis and the fallout from Iran. But there will be no attempt to sign a joint communique on the conflicts and Macron will instead issue a summary.
The French president also plans to issue concise communiques after each working session; common ground will be sought on critical mineral supply chains, artificial intelligence, containing damage from geopolitical conflicts, and reforming international development partnerships. Tech titans attending the summit on Wednesday will include Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, and Arthur Mensch, the French founder of Mistral AI, giving Macron a chance to promote his regulatory initiatives – which include banning social media for those under 15 or 16.
The climate crisis, normally a G7 staple, has been kept off the agenda as it will provoke a row. But in a deft piece of diplomacy, Macron has chosen to make global economic imbalances – code for booming Chinese exports and accusations that Chinese state subsidies are fuelling a record Chinese trade surplus – a centrepiece of the formal summit as it is a subject on which Europe and the US identify a shared culprit.
Chinese success in high-value products such as electric vehicles has become all the more alarming for Europe as these are sectors the west thought it would dominate. For France and other EU states facing manufacturing job losses, it sounds at times as if the only solution will be protectionism and EU tariffs on Chinese products.
But Macron has been careful to try to frame this debate as one of greater collective solidarity, as opposed to China-bashing, to prevent what remains of the multilateral trading system from fragmenting further. The G7 had to “help China to generate the internal demand that it really needs”, he explained at an event last week attended by video by the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing. Europe for its part had to address under-investment, Macron said. Little that Zhang said strayed from the usual Chinese denial of unfair trade practices, arguing that the country could hardly be blamed for pursuing a successful industrial policy.
If the worst comes to the worst, the Évian golf course – which dates back to 1904 – is closed for the three days, and if the earnest summitry gets too much, it represents an escape route for the world’s most famous 80-year-old golfer.