What Just Happened #56
Fog settles over the shining city on a hill
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This week we talk summits, travel bans and a travel deal you will want to miss.
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SUMMING UP THE G7: It’s all just extraordinary. The G7 is a group of the world’s biggest economies with similar political systems (thereby eliminating China and India), whose leaders and guests traveled to a meeting outside Calgary, Alberta, Canada this week, far from any of their own capitals. As always, they all had business with the American president.
During his brief time there, Donald Trump spent time pouting about his friend Vladimir Putin being ‘kicked out’ of what was once the G8. Later the German Chancellor got it right when he noted that Putin’s exclusion came after his annexation of Crimea and, “In this format, we are not sitting at the table with warlords, and not with war criminals.”
On the first night of the planned two day summit Donald Trump declared that everyone in Tehran, a city of ten million or so, should evacuate, and then he left the meeting abruptly, his tattered peace prize prospects flapping in his considerable wake.
As the president was flying home to Washington, Vladimir Putin showed his respect to Trump, the United States and its G7 allies by staging a prolonged, almost nine hour overnight attack on Kyiv. We may surmise the barrage was timed precisely to coincide with the G7 meeting, because Putin has done just that kind of thing before.
The Russian president showed the same respect to Western allies in February last year, arranging for Alexi Navalny’s death to be announced while the allies were convened for the Munich Security Conference in February. Navalny’s wife, who was in attendance in Munich, would appear before the cameras in a searing video moment:
Russia used hundreds of drones and missiles in its attack on Monday, and authorities said 28 people were dead and more than 150 injured across eight districts of the capital, including a 62 year old American citizen. About 280 Shahed attack drones, at least two Kinzhal ballistic missiles and other cruise missiles were involved. Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said cluster munitions had been found. Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X that “Such attacks are pure terrorism.”
Back in Canada, Donald Trump was scheduled to meeting the next day with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This would have been Trump’s first meeting with Sheinbaum, whose citizens Trump is currently demonizing, and with whom he surely has important business.
Sheinbaum and Zelenskyy, who requires lengthy train travel from Kyiv to near the Polish border just to fly out of his own country, both made specific efforts to come to the middle of Canada to meet with Trump. Trump cancelled their meetings saying “I wish I could stay for tomorrow, but they understand.”
Turns out Trump made no decisions on the night he stormed away that couldn’t have been made later, or while he was in Canada. Before the week was out, he declared he would do nothing for two weeks.
David Rothkopf says,
“Trump said he left the G7 meeting because he had to attend to important Iran-Israel business. Nonsense. He could’ve handle that from Canada. He left because he was isolated and alone at the summit, a source of ridicule and derision from his peers. Especially after he made his sniveling pitch for Putin to join the group even as Putin was attacking more civilians in Ukraine brutally. But doing Putin’s errands was the job he was assigned and when it was done he headed home in a snit. He does not like our allies. They do not like him. It makes him one of the weakest leaders in our history….”
And Politico wrote in its Canadian Playbook, under the header “COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE,”
“Sure, Donald Trump choppered away from the G7 leaders' summit one day early, lashing out at French President Emmanuel Macron on social media, unloading bombastic posts that threatened violence in Iran, and casually telling reporters on Air Force One that Canadians would avoid tariffs if only they chose statehood.”
None of this bodes especially well for next week’s NATO summit in the Hague, does it?
Collective action is needed on urgent business all over the world, yet the G7 countries are at a loss about how to deal with an ally like Donald Trump, who is intent on performing his presidency as a television drama.
The G7 and its friends have enormous potential power and resources, but they continue to shy away from closing ranks to counter the Trump carnival. Is Donald Trump really the king of the world?
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ONE GOOD THING: The French president got cheeky. On the way to the G7 he stopped in Greenland to get up in Donald Trump’s face a little bit. All in the name of allied European solidarity, mind you:
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NATO: The 76th NATO summit is next week in the Hague, and allies hope it will merely underperform, rather than be actively undermined by Donald Trump. As we saw this week in Canada, disruption is something he enjoys. Yesterday, Trump’s press secretary “confirmed that the president will be attending … departing from Washington on Monday.”
It will be former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s first summit as Secretary General, and Rutte will hope to persuade NATO’s 32 members to agree to spend five percent of their GDP on defense, by some date yet to be wrangled. Norway endorsed that plan this week; Spain called it ‘unreasonable.’ Agreement is in still doubt days ahead of the summit, and even if it’s achieved, it may not last past autumn.
From Globsec, an annual Central European Security Forum held this year in Prague, Rikard Jozwiak reported for RFERL this week that Czechia could well ruin Rutte’s plans. Czech parliamentarian elections are due in October, and the populist ANO party is polling 30 to 35 percent, well ahead of the currently governing Fiala, at around 19 to 22 percent.
Karel Havlicek, currently ANO shadow prime minister, pointedly told Globsec that he doesn’t “agree that Russia is an immediate danger to NATO,” and that “defense spending should not be about percentages, but about efficiency and transparency.”
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MORE TRAVEL BANS? The president is said to be considering travel bans on these additional countries: Angola; Antigua and Barbuda; Benin; Bhutan; Burkina Faso; Cabo Verde; Cambodia; Cameroon; Democratic Republic of Congo; Djibouti; Dominica; Ethiopia; Egypt; Gabon; Gambia; Ghana; Ivory Coast; Kyrgyzstan; Liberia; Malawi; Mauritania; Niger; Nigeria; Saint Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia; Sao Tome and Principe; Senegal; South Sudan; Syria; Tanzania; Tonga; Tuvalu; Uganda; Vanuatu; Zambia; and Zimbabwe.
A cable went out under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s name to the 36 countries—25 of them in Africa—”to take action to address the U.S. concerns within 60 days or risk being added to the current travel ban, the AP reported this week.
Several small countries aren’t shown on this map: Cabo Verde, Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Sao Tome and Principe, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Overall, it starts to look like we’re gearing up for a full Africa ban, doesn’t it?
It’s a funny list because nothing ties these countries together, except, I guess, that they fit the president’s list of ‘shithole countries’ (his term) in that most are in Africa. Or maybe the president’s team of august geopolitical operators have just never heard of some of them.
Some clearly are unlike most of the others. Bhutan, for example. It’s filled with gorgeous mountain peaks, alpine air and peaceful Buddhist people. It’s so mountainous in fact that only a few specially trained pilots can land at its only current international airport, and then only under visual flight rules because of the terrain. It’s in the Himalayas and utterly unlike the tropical African countries on the list.
If they’re not familiar with some of the other countries, the Trump geo-whizzes might have imposed arbitrary rules like, say, any country with a ‘Z’ in its name? That takes care of four—Kyrgyzstan, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe—outta here. Kyrgyzstan, by the way, has nothing besides a Z in its name in common with the other three.
I’m pretty sure they’ve never heard of Dominica. Not a whole lot of people have heard of Dominica. It’s a quiet corrupt, mostly impoverished Caribbean island of about 65,000 very sweet people who are fortunate that, as an affable stranger told me there, you can live in Dominica with no money.
And Tonga? What did Tonga ever do to anybody?
But then I realized I had it all wrong from the start. I gave the administration too much credit for having a team of geopolitical thinkers at all. I suddenly realized there’s a much simpler explanation.
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BUY THIS TRAVEL DEAL NOW: Speaking of travel, now here’s a fun trip: Russia and North Korea are to restart direct train service linking Moscow and Pyongyang next week for the first time since 2020, Russian Railways announced on Monday. Russian Railways says that, at eight-days and ten thousand kilometers, it will be the world’s longest direct railway route.
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RECOMMENDATION: When you get a chance—with all that free time you’ve got— have a look at Novaya Gazeta Europe. It’s where that Moscow to Pyongyang train story comes from. The original Novaya Gazeta was an independent newspaper in Moscow during the brief but exuberant flowering of post-Soviet freedom founded in 1993 “partly using money from Mikhail Gorbachev’s Nobel Peace Prize.”
Novaya Gazeta Europe began online publication three months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, free press having long since been chased out of Russia, is based in Riga, Latvia. It’s a low key affair and (my opinion) it gives a deeper and richer interpretation of events than does day to day journalism.
Here are a couple more less-than-mass media news/feature sources you might try, if you haven’t already: Meduza’s The Beet is “one feature story every month. From Budapest to Bishkek.” VSquare “comes from “V4,” an abbreviation of the Visegrád Four country group, which is made up of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.” It does in-depth and investigative journalism from Central Europe.
Check ‘em out.
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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. Please pass this article around and invite your friends to subscribe. And do let me hear from you.
See you next week.
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Cheers,
Bill
