There are a few certainties about the G7 meeting that kicked off on Friday. The temperature will vary from extremely hot to frigidly cold and, the chances are that it will turn into a high-level brawl. By now, at normal summits, the advance party of diplomatic sherpas would have finalised the draft statement even before the leaders arrive for their talkfest and the only task left would be to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. This time the diplomats are facing two disastrous alternatives: that there might be no summit statement at all or that the statement will be made by only six out of the seven participants. Donald Trump, who till the very last minute, was not sure whether he would attend the meeting, finally let it be known that he would depart early, skipping the sessions on climate change and the environment. In the run-up to the summit, he exchanged angry tweets and phone calls with French President Emmanuel Macron, on whom he had lavished praise earlier in the year and had an irate telephone call with Canada’s Justin Trudeau. He also dismissed Germany’s Angela Merkel and the UK’s Theresa May as too “politically correct”.
Trump has picked fights around the world and his tactics have infuriated his allies and puzzled his foes. He is obsessed by trade deficits and the fact that the US has deficits with all its key trading partners including China, the European Union (EU), Canada and even smaller ones like India. His chosen weapons to right this are tariffs on items like steel and aluminium made in the EU and Canada. He has also invoked national security to threaten tariffs on Canadian automobiles, drawing the furious retort from Trudeau that Canada and the US have always been at peace.
But by taking a wrecker’s ball to the World Trade Organisation, Trump may yet emerge as its unlikely saviour, simply by uniting the rest. One of the WTO’s huge achievements has been its dispute settlement mechanism. At the WTO meeting in December 2017, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who’s known as a Trump administration hard-liner, suggested that members had to look at “whether the current litigation structure makes sense”. Lighthizer also targeted India and China for the tariff concessions that the two countries receive under WTO rules. What can the remaining members of the G7 do in the face of the grouping’s largest member going rogue? They may well fall back on organisations like the WTO in the hope that it will somehow force the US to fall back in line. For now, it seems unlikely that Trump will heed such strictures. But, he’s picking fights in all corners of the globe and that could recoil on him in the coming months.