11 June 2018 - G7 Summit
G7 summit: Donald Trump lashes out at America's key allies
(BBC News, 11/06/2018)
US President Donald Trump has fired off a string of angry tweets criticising America's closest allies hours after leaving a divisive G7 summit in Canada.
Mr Trump said the US paid "close to the entire cost of Nato" to help protect countries that "rip us off on trade".
"Fair trade is now to be called fool trade," he added in response to the threat of new tariffs against the US.
Trump’s ‘Bully’ Attack on Trudeau Outrages Canadians
Dan Bilefsky and Catherine Porter (The New York Times, 10/06/2018)
Canadians have had enough.
It takes a lot to rile people in this decidedly courteous nation. But after President Trump’s parting shots against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the day he left the Group of 7 summit meeting in Quebec, the country reacted with uncharacteristic outrage and defiance at a best friend’s nastiness.
“It was extremely undiplomatic and antagonistic,” Frank McKenna, a former Canadian ambassador to the United States, wrote in an email. “It was disrespectful and ill informed.”
Trudeau 'stabbed us in back' on trade, says Trump chief economic adviser
Oliver Laughland (The Guardian, 10/06/2018)
Donald’s Trump’s chief economic adviser said the US pulled out of a G7 communique because the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, “stabbed us in the back” and accused the leader of one America’s most important allies of playing a “sophomoric political stunt for domestic consumption”.
In an extraordinary interview with CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Larry Kudlow, who was present for negotiations at the G7 summit in Quebec over the weekend, said Trudeau had instigated “a betrayal” and was “essentially double-crossing President Trump”.
Trudeau used a media conference on Saturday to reject a US demand for a sunset clause in the North American trade agreement, Nafta, that Trump has at different times pressed to abolish or renegotiate. The prime minister also said Canada would “move forward with retaliatory measures” in response to the Trump administration’s move to impose tariffs on aluminium and steel imports from the European Union, Mexico and Canada.
Donald Trump lobs a grenade from afar into the G7
(The Economist, 10/06/2018)
For a moment, the Group of Seven (G7) leaders attending their annual summit, in a mountain village in Quebec, looked like they had managed to paper over their differences with President Donald Trump and present a united front. They found just the right wording to secure American agreement on matters that never used to be in question, such as supporting democracy, abiding by international-trade rules and fighting terrorism. Even Mr Trump professed himself pleased, calling the summit wonderful and rating his relationships with other leaders as ten out of ten.
Yet barely ten minutes after the official communiqué was published, he changed his mind. He tweeted from somewhere over the Pacific, en route to his “mission of peace” in Singapore with Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s despotic ruler, that he had instructed his officials not to endorse the communiqué. He attacked Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister and host of the summit, for making “false statements” at his closing news conference, and renewed his threat to impose tariffs on automobiles supposedly “flooding the U.S. Market!”.