PARIS – Donald Trump turned 80 on Sunday night, surrounded by cage fighters on the South Lawn of the White House, and then got on a plane to France.
The juxtaposition was not accidental. Trump had made clear for months that the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, a Belle Époque spa town on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, would wait for him. France rescheduled the gathering – moving it from June 14–16 to June 15–17 – to avoid competing with his birthday. A structure known as “The Claw,” an outdoor UFC octagon erected on the grounds where presidents have received foreign dignitaries and state guests, was to give way, hours later, to Air Force One.
The summit opens Monday. What Trump is flying into is a different matter from the agenda Macron spent a year constructing.
A survey published this week by the European Council on Foreign Relations, conducted across 15 European countries in May, found that only 11 percent of respondents now consider the United States an ally that shares their interests and values. That figure was 16 percent six months ago and 22 percent in November 2024 – a collapse in public confidence that tracks, almost perfectly, with the arc of Trump’s second term. Majorities in every country surveyed said they doubted Washington would come to their defense if attacked.
This is the room Emmanuel Macron is hosting. His challenge in Évian, the Council on Foreign Relations noted, may be less about advancing France’s carefully constructed agenda than simply managing the summit itself – preventing the accumulated tensions from overwhelming the meeting before the three days are out.
The agenda France assembled over its G7 presidency is substantial: addressing macroeconomic imbalances driven in part by China’s industrial overcapacity, strengthening critical mineral supply chains, reforming international development finance, and advancing AI governance. Macron invited Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic to a lunch session Wednesday on protecting minors online. He held a videoconference last week with G7 members and Chinese representatives to discuss trade imbalances – a signal that Paris intends to use the summit to keep Beijing in a dialogue rather than simply inside a target.
That architecture is now competing with a different set of priorities. Trump arrives with an agenda centered on what he views as inadequate allied support following Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the aftermath of the US and Israeli strikes in late February – the conflict that has since reshaped every energy market in the G7 and pushed the European Central Bank to raise interest rates for the first time since 2023. Eastern Herald reported earlier on how the Hormuz crisis moved to the top of the Évian agenda, displacing the climate priorities France had originally placed at the center of its presidency.
Aside from Iran, Trump’s priorities in Évian are expected to include AI adoption led by US firms, critical mineral independence from Chinese supply chains, and tying US development assistance to bilateral commercial deals. In most of these areas, the gap between the American position and its allies’ is one of method rather than destination – both sides want Chinese influence over rare earth supply chains reduced, but disagree sharply on whether tariffs or coordinated multilateral frameworks are the right instrument.
The deeper divide may not surface on the formal agenda at all. Support for Ukraine, climate policy, digital sovereignty, and trade remain topics where the six non-US members are likely to coordinate more closely with each other than with Washington. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived in Évian with a speech about the post-Cold War order breaking down – a frame that positions the summit less as a coordination mechanism than as a farewell to one.
French officials want to ensure Trump does not leave early. At the 2025 G7 in Kananaskis, he departed after the first day, citing developments in the Middle East. This time, they are hoping a potential bilateral with Macron in Paris could extend his stay beyond the scheduled window – though no such meeting has been confirmed. An immense security operation is in place across the French-Swiss border, with Geneva’s airport receiving world leaders while shops on the Swiss side of Lake Geneva have boarded up their windows.
What Évian can actually produce is the question no sherpa has answered to anyone’s satisfaction. Markets have already priced in some relief on the Hormuz premium following signals of a possible US-Iran agreement – which, if it holds, removes the most combustible item from the Évian agenda before the leaders have even sat down. Whether that creates space for something substantive on trade, development, or AI governance, or whether Trump uses the opening to push harder on allied burden-sharing, is a question that will not resolve before Monday morning.
The UFC arena on the South Lawn was described by Trump, some weeks back, as something he might never want to take down. Évian-les-Bains, meanwhile, has been waiting for this moment since 2003, the last time it hosted the G8, when Russia was still at the table. Both venues, in their way, reflect the same confusion about what the world order is supposed to look like – and who is supposed to be running it.
