Coping with Trump

The challenge for US allies

This picture was taken by Jesco Denzel, an official German government photographer, on 8 June 2017 during the 44^th G-7 summit, held in Quebec. It came during a break from an intense set of exchanges on trade and tariffs. The photo was released the next day by the then German Chancellor Angela Merkel on her Instagram account, with an innocuous caption explaining that this was a ‘spontaneous meeting between two working sessions.’ It soon went viral.

It is not hard to see why Merkel found irresistible a picture that puts her at the centre of a dramatic encounter. It captures a moment of conflict and tension. Her pose is confident and self-assured, leaning forward with her hands on the table giving President Trump her hardest stare. Trump is the only person seated, staring back with his arms defiantly folded.

Standing beside Trump is his national security advisor John Bolton. Watching, with an anxious look, is the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, also with his hands folded. We can see the profile of French President Emmanuel Macron as if he is trying to get a word in. We know British Prime Minister Theresa May is there because that is clearly the back of her hair. Out of the picture is the host, Justin Trudeau, who was standing to Trump’s left, apparently reading some papers. More pictures of the same encounter, distributed by other key participants, can be found, here, including Trump’s, in which he is strangely lost in shadows, and Macron’s, in which he is finally getting his chance to address Trump, and is gesticulating as he does so.

This picture suited both Merkel and Trump – Merkel because it showed her (literally) standing up to Trump and leading the way in chastising the president for his damaging policies. Yet Trump was also content with this image, even as it went viral. It showed him unwilling to budge, even when others were ganging up on him. At a news conference he likened the US to ‘the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing’, and Bolton tweeted this image including this line, adding ‘The President made it clear today. No more.’

This picture is now regularly recalled as a reminder of the challenges US allies faced during Trump’s first term and what they can expect to deal with during his second. But the picture also illustrates something else. In the six plus years since it was taken the cast of allies has changed, with Trudeau on his way out and a weakened Macron the last of the old guard. As a group their self-confidence has declined. The intervening years have been tough – because of Covid and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also because of the widening gap between the US economic performance and that of Europeans. In 2018 the allies as a group felt that they represented a superior set of values, which need to be protected and asserted against a right-wing threat represented by Trump. Now these values are coming under increasing challenge.

To see how this came about this post will look first at relations between Merkel and Trump before telling the story of the 2018 G-7 summit, which was largely about Trudeau and Trump, and what it tells us about engaging with the returning President. I’ll conclude by looking at the reasons why this time round the allies will be adopting a less confrontational approach.