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Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump leave after a family photo session during the G7 Summit, in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, June 16, 2025.
Was the G7 a success for host Canada? Let’s take a look!
The G7 meeting this week was always going to be a tricky one. Set against the backdrop of the picturesque mountains of the Kananaskis Range, the meeting also took place amid a much uglier global tableau of trade wars between the world’s largest economies, and ongoing actual wars between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Hamas and, on the summit’s eve, Israel’s airstrikes on Iran.
All of that was in addition to other long standing agenda items like artificial intelligence, transnational crime, and climate change. And looming over the whole gathering like Mount Galatea itself: the fact that the G7 looks ever more like a G6+1 – with Donald Trump’s US at odds with most of the others on key issues.
So now that it’s over, was it a success for host country Canada and Prime Minister Mark Carney? The report card is mixed. Here are five takeaways that tell the story:
Lapel-level diplomacy: a pin-sized win
It was the lapel pin seen ‘round the world, to paraphrase former Canadian Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole. Okay, seen ‘round Canada, at least. Arriving at the G7, Donald Trump sported a pin featuring the Canada and US flags intertwined. Although Trump was sporting a US flag pin above that, the chattering classes in Canada chose to read the hardware as a good sign that maybe the two countries are ready to go steady again after all. These days you take the wins you can get.
Trade deal pinky promise: medium-sized win with potential to upsize to large
Maybe the pin worked a little magic. After an hour-plus bilateral talk on Monday, Mark Carney announced that he and Trump had agreed to ink a trade deal within 30 days. Washington is reportedly still pressuring Canada over its dairy tariffs and digital services taxes. The president reaffirmed that he’s “a tariff person” with “a different concept” of trade from Carney, but also noted the prime minister's “more complex idea” was nonetheless “very good.”
Trump was mostly contained: big win (accomplished the near-impossible)
Avoiding any big dustup with Trump was an important goal, and that seemed to go pretty well. Despite an opening harangue from Trump about why Russia should be back in the group – Moscow was booted over its 2014 annexation of Crimea – Carney did his best, buttering up the president at a joint presser, saying “The G7 is nothing without U.S. leadership.”
It’s true that Trump left early, but it was for a good reason – to address the Israel-Iran crisis – and with no animosity. That’s an improvement from the last time Trump left a Canadian G7 meeting, splitting from at Charlevoix, Quebec in 2018 with a tweet that then-prime minister Justin Trudeau was “Very dishonest & weak.” Carney has a very different – and much better – relationship with the US president. That by itself is a W.
Resetting relations with India: a win for some a capitulation for others
Mark Carney caught a lot of flack, including protests, for inviting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7 meeting in the hopes of resetting Canada’s relationship with India. It was a bold move considering Canada’s intelligence agency warned just last Friday that India actively interferes in Canada’s political affairs and was involved in the 2023 murder of a Sikh Canadian in British Columbia. Nonetheless, the countries agreed to restore full diplomatic relations, including naming high commissioners, and talked about “opportunities to deepen engagement in areas such as technology, the digital transition, food security, and critical minerals.”
Working together as a group: low-hanging fruit, but little progress on the hard questions
The latter hours of the meeting produced several joint statements: members agreed on a series of measures to adopt and support artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. They also agreed to develop a critical minerals action plan, to adopt a wildfire charter, to counter migrant smuggling, and to condemn transnational repression.
But they couldn’t agree on a statement about Russia and Ukraine because of American efforts to soften the language, and had little to say on the Israel-Iran conflict beyond calling for de-escalation and re-affirming that the Iranian government mustn’t develop nuclear weapons.
Final verdict: beautiful setting, middling progress, no disasters. Overall, a qualified win for Carney, but only if he can keep the momentum up in areas that matter to Canadians.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pictured at the Group of Seven summit venue in Kananaskis, Canada, on June 17, 2025.
What We’re Watching: Disappointing day for Zelensky, Tensions flare on Thailand’s border, Armenia and Turkey turn a new leaf
Bad day for Zelensky
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky left the G7 without getting a meeting with US President Donald Trump. To add insult to injury, the Trump administration has suspended a working group meant to pressure Russia into speeding up peace talks with Ukraine. This all comes as the US is planning to send Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg to meet with Russian-aligned Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko – the highest ranking US official to meet with the authoritarian leader since 2020.
Border tensions flare between Thailand and Cambodia
Thousands of protestors gathered in Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh on Wednesday to show support for the government’s decision to deploy the armed forces to the country’s border with Thailand. Tensions between the two countries have escalated in recent weeks following a brief military clash in their disputed border zone late last month, which left one Cambodian soldier dead. This comes as Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s ruling coalition appears on the verge of collapse over perceptions that she has been too diplomatic in her approach to Cambodia.
Armenia’s PM to make rare visit to Turkey
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Friday, in a bid to repair one of the world’s most antagonistic relationships. The bad blood originates from World War One, when the Ottoman empire killed masses of Armenians. More recently, it has revolved around Armenia’s post-Soviet wars with Azerbaijan, a Turkish ally. Russian-aligned Armenia – a tiny, isolated nation – lost the last round of conflict with Azerbaijan in 2023, and sees rapprochement with Turkey as a way to broaden its ties to the West.U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to attend the G7 Leaders' Summit at the Rocky Mountain resort town of Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, June 15, 2025.
The G7: Now G6 + 1?
The G7 is no longer setting the table; it’s struggling to hold the cutlery. Once a pillar of the post-war world order, the group today is split between the US and the rest, casting about for common ground. Before this week’s summit even kicked off in Kananaskis, Canada, host Prime Minister Mark Carney warned there would be no final joint communique. So what’s up for discussion - and what could be achieved?
The official agenda: Trade, defense, and AI
Trade trumps climate change. With US President Donald Trump back on the scene, tariffs are huge, while climate action takes a backseat. Leaders will try to defend existing net-zero goals, update plans to tackle wildfires, and boost clean tech cooperation. But the meetings’ first focus is on trade, and striking deals. Countries will seek to defend themselves against Trump’s protectionist policies by both expanding trade with each other and getting Trump to lift tariffs on their countries.
Defense and Industry. While the Iran-Israel war now overshadows existing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, support for Kyiv is still on the menu. The tone is shifting, however, to talk of pan-European defense against Russian aggression. Carney, French president Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are expected to push for a “defense-industrial pact,” a long-term commitment to arms production and supply chains to “Re-Arm Europe”.
Artificial Intelligence and Misinformation Leaders are looking at baseline safeguards around algorithmic transparency and deepfake detection, given the worldwide rise in election interference, cybercrime and cyberwarfare. While global AI regulation is unlikely, the G7 may commit to coordinating digital watchdogs and fighting cross-border disinformation campaigns.
The backstory: America alone
All these items are dominated by a larger issue: the widening gap between the US and its allies. Trump’s view of the world order diverges starkly from that of the other members of the group. His thin skin and volatility could also compromise the outcome of the talks, especially if he storms out like he did at the infamous 2018 Charlevoix summit. Carney’s main tasks include preventing Trump from feeling disrespected, and navigating the divide between G6 goals and US ambitions such as Trump’s takedown of China.
What can this meeting achieve, then?
Expect no joint statement, but lots of bilateral action, with both Trump and other world leaders. On Sunday, for example, Carney and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a strengthened partnership on a range of issues including trade and defense. Carney has also invited a slew of non-G7 leaders, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, arguing that they are key to solving major questions such as energy security and AI. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will also be present, as will the leaders of Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea and South Africa. In the end, the biggest achievement may simply be keeping the group alive to meet another day.Graphic Truth: G7 vs BRICS, who has more economic clout?
The G7 countries – the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Japan – will convene this weekend in Kananaskis, a rural town in the mountains of Alberta, Canada. High on the meeting’s agenda are tariffs, artificial intelligence, and international security, with special focus on Russian sanctions and Israel’s recent attacks on Iran.
While the G7 was originally formed as an informal grouping of the world’s wealthiest democracies, the BRICS – composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa – have sought to challenge their dominance of the global agenda.
Here’s a look at how the share of the global economy held by G7 and BRICS nations has evolved over time.
Graphic Truth: Motherhood can wait
Women in wealthy countries are increasingly waiting to have children. What gives? Well, a complex array of factors are fueling this trend, but financial concerns appear to be a central cause.
A recent poll in Canada, for example, found that 55% of Canadians between the ages of 18 to 34 pointed to the housing crisis as affecting their decision and timing about when to start a family.
In the US, child care costs are a growing concern across the country. Meanwhile, the US remains on a short list of countries that do not guarantee paid parental leave. Have economic conditions made it more difficult to have children? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Write to us here.
Graphic Truth: Hospital bed decline
They made their bed – and were forced to lie in it.
At the start of the pandemic, G7 countries were plagued by a huge uptick in hospital admissions – and the shocking reality that hospital beds had been on a 50-year decline. Four years later, these countries have still not reversed the downward spiral.
In the US, over the last five decades, care has shifted away from inpatient hospital settings and to outpatient services to cut costs. The decrease has also been intentional. In 1974, the government began an initiative to directly cut the number of hospital beds, believing in a rule called Roemer's Law, which said that “a hospital bed built would be a hospital bed filled,” thus driving up costs.
However, the US’s free-market healthcare system still provides more hospital beds per capita than the government-dominated system in Canada. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Ontario has just one intensive-care bed for every 800 residents, giving it no surge capacity. Michael Decter, the former chair of the Health Council of Canada told the CBC that because Canada’s system is public, “we tend to ration everything.”
Across the G7, governments have reduced hospital capacity to cut costs and because advances in medical care have decreased the amount of time patients spend in hospitals. However, older people – who are more likely to spend time in hospital – are also taking up an increasing share of G7 populations. The result is higher wait times, lower surge capacity, and worsening patient care.
History has its eyes on US
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Europe was preoccupied with the future of the transatlantic relationship. In London, almost every conversation among think tanks, civil society, and diplomatic circles eventually came around to the so-called special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, just then wrestling with its Brexit bet.
There was plenty of hand-wringing about whether Donald Trump would be reelected in 2020. The frequently heard view across the pond was that Europeans could forgive Americans for electing Trump for the first time in 2016 – for they knew not what they did. But to return him to office, without the guise of plausible deniability, would mean something else entirely.
Europe would have been put on notice that US voters had accepted the “America First” embrace. The US was going home, and Europe might need to go it alone.
As we find ourselves in the (re)run-up to another Trump-Biden election season, all eyes are again on US voters and the choice they have set before themselves in November. Tariffs and trade policy are up for grabs, the energy and regulatory environment face “sliding doors,” and diplomatic and multilateral engagement find themselves on differential courses – on display last week at the annual G7 Summit where Biden sought in his final pre-election summit to keep the wartime band together with new US measures to intensify pressure on Russia and a transatlantic pledge to leverage Russia’s immobilized assets for Ukraine funding.
It is all too clear that geopolitics is at stake this fall.
What if the 2020 election vantage point from abroad got it wrong?
What if, despite the US rethinking its global role, we are still in the age of US primacy after all? Over the past four years, the US may have unwittingly made this case.
During the pandemic, US pharmaceutical firms – in concert with global researchers – delivered groundbreaking vaccines to save lives. Across the security sphere, the US has led its European partners on a renaissance of NATO, charting the course on both the sanctions to constrain Russia and the military expenditures to bolster Ukraine. Earlier this spring, when further US funding came into doubt, Ukraine and Europe faced a protracted scare. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US has demonstrated that without any boots on the ground and with untiring diplomatic efforts bearing only partial fruit, it remains a pivotal player in any room. Iran’s attack on Israel on April 13, which saw nearly all of its 300-plus missiles shot down by a US-led coalition supporting Israel, is prime evidence.
And despite years of hard- versus soft-landing debates, the United States remains the world’s largest economy. In recent years, the Biden administration has been busy trying a new industrial policy on for size, a model now being replicated elsewhere. Meanwhile, the US Federal Reserve has set the global template and pace on fiscal policy.
The US dollar remains dominant, even as Russia and others that face a widening web of US-led sanctions and tools of economic security have continued to study currency alternatives. According to the Fed’s latest available data (2022), the US dollar represents 58% of global official foreign exchange reserves compared with the next best Euro at 21%. The dollar was involved in roughly 88% of global foreign exchange transactions in April 2022, a figure that has been stable for 20 years.
According to polling conducted across Europe, Canada, and the United States in 2023 by the German Marshall Fund in its Transatlantic Trends series, 64% of respondents viewed the US as the most influential actor in global affairs (including 62% of Europeans). Lest we overlook it, the same polling found that only 14% viewed China as the most influential global actor.
Looking across the ocean, the view from Europe looks significantly less lonesome than it did on the cusp of 2020. This might be because Trump did not win in 2020, or it might be that the US is more structurally entrenched in the global system than domestic partisan politics suggests. Will a Biden 2.0 mean the status quo on transatlantic support for Ukraine? Would a Trump 2.0 see the administration drive Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table and pursue a deal that leaves Europe out in the cold? Will Trump’s transactional foreign policy present a sharp test for Europe with more bilateral relationships than multilateral engagement?
Either way, November’s election and its aftermath will begin to answer these questions.
Lindsay Newman is the practice head of Global Macro, Geopolitics for Eurasia Group and is based in London. She writes the Views on America column for GZERO.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, U.S. President Joe Biden, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and World Bank President Ajay Banga attend a Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) event, on the first day of the G7 summit, in Savelletri, Italy, June 13, 2024.
G7 strikes compromise on Ukraine funding
Both Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden flew to Italy this week for G7 meetings, where they pledged to strengthen the coalition supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders.
The G7 countries are expected to agree to lend Ukraine about $50 billion for reconstruction, backing the loan by using the interest accruing on $300 billion worth of Russian assets that were frozen by Western financial institutions after the invasion.
The move is a grand compromise between countries, like Canada, which have called for outright seizure of those assets in order to give them directly to Ukraine, and countries in Europe, where many of the assets are located, which have pushed back, citing issues of rule of law and precedent for other investors.
Putting the deal in practice will still require some complicated financial and legal chicanery, say experts, but the sense of urgency comes in part from concerns about the US Presidential election this fall.
Polls continue to show Biden, a strong supporter of Ukraine, trailing Donald Trump, who has shown little interest in helping Kyiv.
The asset-interest scheme is seen as a way to lock in a stream of Western financing for Ukraine that exists independently of any changing political winds in Washington.