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《环球时报》:孙德刚:G7 struggles for unity, relevance amid US President’s early exit

发布时间:2025-06-17浏览次数:10

(来源:《环球时报》,2025-06-17)

The logo for the G7 summit at the Pomeroy Kananaskis Mountain Lodge stands at the press center in Banff, Canada. Photo:VCG

The logo for the G7 summit at the Pomeroy Kananaskis Mountain Lodge stands at the press center in Banff, Canada. Photo: VCG


Despite being the first G7 Summit since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the US leader left the event early, according to media reports. 

Some media outlets pointed out that this year's summit opened with deep divisions. CNBC said the issue of the US president's tariffs remains a source of deep tension between allies and the US. 

Trump signaled on Monday that the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran is intensifying rapidly, announcing that he would return to Washington a day early from the G7 summit in Canada to monitor developments after issuing an ominous warning to Iranians to immediately evacuate their capital city, CNN said. 

According to Reuters, Trump left the Group of Seven summit in Canada a day early due to the situation in the Middle East, the White House said on Monday. However, Trump said late on Monday his early departure from the Group of Seven nations summit has nothing to do with working on a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, denying comments by French President Emmanuel Macron who said the US president made a ceasefire proposal.

According to Reuters, Canada has abandoned any effort to adopt a comprehensive communique to avert a repeat of the 2018 summit in Quebec, when Trump instructed the US delegation to withdraw its approval of the final communique after leaving.

Leaders have prepared several draft documents seen by Reuters, including on migration, artificial intelligence, and critical minerals. None of them have been approved by the United States, however, according to sources briefed on the documents.

Earlier on Monday, a White House official said that the US president had decided not to sign onto a G7 statement calling for de-escalation between Iran and Israel, according to The New York Times. 

But later that day, as Trump departed Canada to return to Washington, he signed onto an Iran statement after all, the NYT said. 

The statement called Iran as the principal source of regional instability and terror, urging the resolution of the Iranian crisis leads to a broader de-escalation of hostilities in the Middle East, including a ceasefire in Gaza. 

The G7 may hope to use collective pressure to force Iran to back down and halt its attacks on Israel, however, it is also likely to send the wrong signal to Israel, emboldening it to strike Iran with greater confidence and potentially escalate the scale of its attacks, Sun Degang, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Fudan University, told the Global Times on Tuesday. 

Issuing such an indiscriminate, one-sided condemnation of Iran is a rare move, said Lü Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Yet the six G7 nations unreservedly echoed the US stance on the issue, making a blanket statement that defies nuance.

The conflict between Israel and Iran is currently one of the most serious regional issues globally. In theory, the US president should have sat down with his allies to discuss a coordinated response. But instead, the US leader chose to leave the summit early, Lü said.

For the remaining six countries, this was undoubtedly a cold dismissal, Lü added. They may have expected the US to engage in active coordination, as in the past, but the US president used the issue as a reason to walk away.

The collective rise of Global South countries and the accelerating trend toward multipolarity have significantly elevated the role of genuinely multilateral institutions like the UN. In this context, the G7, a coalition increasingly seen as a form of pseudo-multilateralism, appears increasingly out of step with global realities, Li Haidong, a professor at China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.