During an appearance with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau before the leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized democracies gathered in Quebec, Emmanuel Macron didn’t just reflect on the policies that put Trump at odds with many of the other participants, though there are plenty of those. (See: Trump pulling out of the international Paris climate-change pact, withdrawing from the multilateral Iran nuclear agreement, and imposing steep steel and aluminum tariffs on Europe, Canada, and Mexico.) The leader of America’s oldest ally also stated that the U.S. needed to be persuaded to remain in the “community of nations”—to stay not in the narrow confines of the Paris accord or the Iran deal or some free-trade agreement with the European Union, not even in the broader transatlantic alliance, but in the broadest dimension of the civilized world. [...]
And Macron, it turns out, has company. On Friday, European Council President Donald Tusk, who warned days into the Trump administration that the new American president posed a threat to European unity, arrived in Quebec for the G7 summit and reported that the threat, in fact, was actually much bigger than that. The “rules-based international order is being challenged,” he argued—“not by the usual suspects, but by its main architect and guarantor: the U.S.”
“We cannot force the U.S. to change their minds,” Tusk noted. “At the same time, we will not stop trying to convince our American friends and President Trump that undermining this order makes no sense at all. Because it would only play into the hands of those who seek a new, post-West order, where liberal democracy and fundamental freedoms would cease to exist. This is in the interest of neither the U.S. nor Europe.”
No comments:
Post a Comment