G6.66 - geopolitical sketch

The recent G7 meeting in Canada was scheduled to last three days, Donald Trump managed two.

Of course, he pleaded the emerging crisis between Israel and Iran for only staying for two thirds of the meeting but everyone believed, rightly I'm sure, that Trump was bored and just wanted to get home as quickly as possible. He has a short attention span when the focus isn't all on him so having to share a platform with a group of second-rate so-called world leaders was bound to make him fractious. Collegiate is not a word in his lexicon.

Besides which, despite his professed love for Canada (so great he wants it as his 51st state), being rusticated in a remote mountain lodge in Alberta is not his style at all. He's a metropolitan to his core, a New Yorker for Chrissakes, and the only grass he feels at home on, apart from the White House lawn, is the golf course - and then preferably one he owns. Someone once unkindly remarked that Canada is a great country, just not for the whole weekend. It seems Trump agrees.

The G7, founded in 1975, is an odd survival from another era. As such, it is now, in so many ways, an anomaly and an anachronism. For starters, the G stands for Great and not all its members are any longer quite as great as they once were. It also now comprises 7+1, consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, plus 'non-enumerated' member, the European Union. Russia was in membership, too, from 1998 to 2014, when it was expelled for its annexation of Crimea, something Trump described as "a big mistake" - their expulsion, that is, not the illegal invasion.

Some work was completed before Trump's precipitate departure from Canada, including his signing of a much-trumpeted trade deal with the UK. Even then, there was an awkward moment when, standing before the press corp with Sir Keir Starmer, Trump dropped the loose papers on the ground, leaving Starmer scrabbling to pick them up. (He was probably grateful a guard dog didn't maul them - imagine trying that lame old schoolboy homework excuse on Kemi Badenoch from the despatch box.)

By leaving early Trump also contrived to miss the arrival of Ukraine's beleaguered president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Tuesday. Having humiliated him in the Oval Office Trump presumably didn't feel any need to appear gracious. In his own mind he probably saw it as a waste of his time and, in that at least, he's being honest. The realpolitik is that the President of the United States doesn't need to defer to anyone, even, as Trump has clearly demonstrated, the electorate. 

As he infamously boasted, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" He can commit murder but provided he commits to making America great again, and has the chutzpah not to give a damn who he offends in doing so, the votes will keep pouring in. Against this background it is surprising that Trump even made it to the second day of the G7 - or, indeed, bothered to attend at all.

He's probably with Meat Loaf on that one: two out of three ain't bad.

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