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There is no founding charter or admissions process to the self-selecting group of “leading” economic powers that currently numbers seven. It was the G8 from 1997 to March 2014. Then Russia annexed Crimea and had its membership suspended, establishing the rule that participating nations should not seize their neighbours’ land.
The White House used to condemn that sort of thing on the grounds that “it violates the principles upon which the international system is built”. These days, not so much. On Sunday, shortly after arriving for a G7 meeting in the Canadian resort of Kananaskis, Donald Trump told his host, the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, that Vladimir Putin’s expulsion from the club had been a “big mistake”.
Within 24 hours Trump was back in Washington. There is precedent for the early departure. In June 2018, during his first term, Trump bailed on a G7 summit to meet North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un. This time he cited the escalating Israel-Iran conflict.
That crisis is serious enough to justify the president clearing his diary of extraneous commitments. But it is revealing that dialogue with the US’s closest allies is a disposable engagement.
Arrogant unilateralism is an old feature of US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. It is the prerogative of a superpower to disregard input from its strategic dependents. But Trump’s G7 snub is not just a crass exaggeration of the usual American style. Sympathy with dictators and discomfort in the company of democrats express Trump’s governing ethos.
“America First” is a doctrine that cannot conceive of mutual obligation between nations. There can be no G7, only the G1 and clients. Leaders who operate in deference to law and independent institutions are weak and contemptible. Strongmen who recognise no legitimate brake on their actions, who have folded the national interest into a personality cult, are admirable.
To say that Trump indulges Putin misconstrues the balance of power. The US is vastly stronger than Russia, but its presidency, bound by fussy checks and balances, lacks the despotic agency of the Kremlin. Trump is envious.
He claims simply to want deals with dictators, but he seems also to crave validation from them. By contrast, he thinks it is humiliating for the US commander-in-chief to be seated at a round table as the peer of a German chancellor or the prime minister of Canada – barely a proper country. The idea of coordinating foreign and trade policy on the basis of shared respect for political pluralism and the rule of law is an idea Trump finds absurd, if he even understands it.
His agenda is dissolution of the west. The US’s former allies need to recognise the magnitude of that ambition. Even when it is acknowledged, the scale of the challenge poses paralysing dilemmas. Layers of economic and military dependency are not easily peeled back. That is true for all of Europe, but especially Britain, where servicing the “special” transatlantic relationship has been the axiomatic priority for decades. The road to a different strategic configuration, closer to allies on our own continent, is made rockier by Brexit.
British audiences watching Trump defile the US constitution might wish Keir Starmer would give voice to their dismay. But there will be no “Love Actually moment” – the term used derisively by diplomats for a fantasy re-enactment of Hugh Grant’s cinematic rebuke to a swaggering, lecherous bully from the White House.
Seasoned Trump handlers warn that disagreeing with the vindictive, thin-skinned president is best done behind closed doors. The art is not to challenge his view, but dress up dissent as a smarter way to satisfy his interests. Contradicting him in public is an act of self-injuring futility.
Confrontation is not Starmer’s style and his method is not fruitless. Trump found time on his curtailed trip to Canada to sign the executive order implementing a milder regime of punitive tariffs on Britain than is faced by most other countries.
“I like them,” Trump said in explanation of relative leniency for British exporters. (The compliment was confounded by his mistakenly describing it as deal with the EU.)
Being liked by Trump is a transient condition. His deals are perishable. The ones signed with Canada and China in his first term were discarded. There are short-term commercial gains to be made by playing along with this capricious game, but the cost is accepting that the old rules no longer apply.
That is bad for free trade and cataclysmic for democracy and international law. Over time, reluctance to say aloud that Trump is an authoritarian menace to the US’s constitutional republic becomes complicity in the assault.
The justification for silence is realpolitik – the argument that foreign policy should be moulded to the world as it is, not brandished as a demand that it be something else. But Trump inhabits a world fashioned around his own narcissistic delusions, populated by corrupt sycophants and far-right ideologues. Realpolitik in Trumpland is not an accommodation with reality but its wilful negation. It means normalising a project to hollow out US democracy, fill the shell with tyranny and call it freedom.
Solidarity with Americans who are resisting that process is one reason for leaders in other countries to talk about it more candidly. Another is to anticipate and contain the risk of contagion.
The Maga movement is indigenous to US politics, and not all of its culture-war obsessions resonate across the Atlantic. But it is also an ideological mothership supporting a flotilla of extreme nationalist parties, campaigns and digital influencers in the EU and the UK. Nigel Farage sails in that slipstream. The Conservatives drift aimlessly alongside.
Trump himself is deeply unpopular in Britain, ranked unfavourably even by Reform UK supporters. Hence Farage is not as quick as he once was to boast of chumminess with the Mar-a-Lago crew. He also bristles when reminded that he once spoke of admiration for Putin. It is one of few lines of questioning that unsettles the mask of amiable composure.
In the coming years, Farage has a balancing act to perform, fellow-travelling with a global consortium of far-right provocateurs and Kremlin apologists, while cultivating the aura of mainstream respectability required of a potential prime minister. He is well practised at the trick. It might be harder if the dark nature of his politics, the reliance on division, the cynical stirring of conflict, could be exposed by association with Trump; the British franchise of a toxic brand.
That argument is harder to make as long as the reality of what is happening in the US is smothered in a gloss of realpolitik. Fear of provoking the tyrant keeps democratic leaders from telling the unvarnished truth about his regime. It is a risk. But a more insidious danger grows in silence, and there is no method for countering tyranny that leaves the truth unspoken.
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Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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On 9 July, join Pippa Crerar, Rafael Behr, Frances O’Grady and Salma Shah as they look back at one year of the Labour government and plans for the next four years
