British Prime Minister Keir Starmer didn’t pipe up when Trump mistakenly announced he’d finally closed a deal “with the European Union,” when he meant to say the U.K. When the papers of said deal dropped tragicomically to the ground after Trump opened a folder to show them off, Starmer immediately scooped them up, later joking that because of strict rules on who can get close to the president, “it would not have been good for anybody else to have stepped forward.”
Carney, for his part, didn’t immediately contradict Trump when he claimed Russia was thrown out of the G8 because of the other leaders’ personal enmity and that the move offended its President Vladimir Putin.
But with Trump safely back home, Carney was braver at his closing press conference.
“It was personally offensive, to put it mildly, to the citizens of Ukraine and the inhabitants of Crimea when Russia invaded in 2014, which was the cause of their ejection from the G8,” Carney said, when asked about Trump’s G8 comments.
Hope isn’t lost
Sure, Trump’s G7 counterparts spent the majority of the summit walking on eggshells — “that’s realpolitik,” a German official said with a shrug, noting that Washington’s economic, military and nuclear might left them with little alternative. “But honestly, I haven’t seen the world ending here, as some reports suggested.”
“Everyone has their own, careful way of navigating” relations with Trump, a Japanese official noted — a strategy that allows the G7 to “live to fight another day.”
