Leaders of some of the world´s biggest economic powers arrived in the Canadian Rockies on June 15 for the G7 summit, overshadowed by the escalating war in the Middle East, US President Donald Trump's trade war and maintaining support for Ukraine in its struggle with Russia.

The summit starts as the US sent a reported 24 tanker planes to Europe to support Israel which has launched a sustained bombing campaign of Iran in an effort to denigrate its nuclear weapons programme and run down its military resources. Britain has also pledged to support Israel’s military in its attack on Iran. Tehran has threatened to attack the military installations in the Middle East of any power that provides Israel with aid.

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he had discussed efforts to de-escalate the crisis with Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the G7 summit, as well as other world leaders, and said he expected "intense discussions" would continue in Canada.

As summit host, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has decided to abandon the annual practice of issuing a joint statement, or communique, at the end of the meeting, highlighting the tensions between the Western powers on how to respond to both the Iranian crisis and Trump’s extreme tariff regime.

The summit highlights the disunity amongst the world’s richest countries that are increasingly attempting to face down a rising alliance from the Global South that is manifest in the spreading warfare in first the Nato-Russia clash fought by proxy in Ukraine and now the escalating conflict in the Middle East fought by Israel, a US ally, against Iran, which is aligned with the Sino-Russian axis.

Superficially, Western leaders want to talk to Trump out of imposing his Liberation Day tariffs, but the summit risks descending into little more than a series of bilateral conversations on patching up Western relations rather than a show of unity against the illiberal forces at play globally or an attempt to return to the “rules based international order” that is supposed to drive Western ideology.

The mercurial Trump arrived at the international summit sporting a "Make America Great Again" hat. He is the wild card, focused more on his “America first” isolationist policies that are central to the new economic paradigm of the transactional multipolar world model that has emerged since he took office at the start of this year.

As he left the White House at the start of his journey to Canada, Trump said: "We have our trade deals. All we have to do is send a letter: `This is what you´re going to have to pay.´ But I think we'll have a few, few new trade deals,” AP reports.

In May, Britain and the US announced a trade deal that will slash US tariffs on UK autos, steel and aluminium, which has yet to take effect. Trump proposed tariffs on the EU have also been delayed while negotiations continue and a wider package of tariffs on Canada are also in limbo for now.

Poignantly the meeting is taking place in Canada, once America’s closest and more loyal ally, but which has now broken with Washington under the new Prime Minister Carney after Trump unilaterally imposed crushing trade sanctions on its northern partner and threatened to annex the country to make it the “51st state.”

Symbolically, French President Emmanuel Macron stopped off in Greenland on his way to Canada, saying it is "not to be sold" nor "to be taken," after Trump threatened to annex the Danish protectorate as well.

The G7 meeting has taken on the flavour of an informal global summit to address the spiralling instability spreading around the world as crises proliferate. Other leaders, not formally part of the G7 club although they are significant players from the Global South, have also been invited to the meeting including the heads of state of India, Ukraine, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Australia, Mexico and the UAE.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is due to attend the summit and is expected to meet with Trump and press him for more military support and tougher sanctions on Russia. Since Trump took office, the US has imposed no new sanctions on Russia whatsoever, whereas the EU has signed off on the seventeenth sanctions package and has promised to reduce imports of Russian oil and gas to zero by 2027.

Ukraine’s military allies pledged €1.3bn of new support at the recent Ramstein meeting in Germany, but US Secretary for Defence Pete Hegseth failed to attend, and the US has pledged zero new spending or supplies for this year,  dropping the burden for supplying Ukraine into the lap of the EU for now. The US House Appropriations Committee recently approved the defence budget for the 2026 fiscal year, maintaining defence spending at 2025’s level. US defence spending in 2026 will total $832bn, but could potentially rise to $1 trillion due to unspent funds for other purposes. However, the committee refused to allocate an additional $300mn for aid to Ukraine.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole warned before the vote that increasing funding for Ukraine could jeopardise the defence budget since some Republicans would oppose the amendment.

Ukraine’s defence has de facto become the responsibility of the top four leaders of the coalition of the willing (CoW4) – Macron, Starmer, the newly installed German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

German officials were keen to counter the suggestion that the summit would be a "six against one" event, noting that the G7 countries have plenty of differences of emphasis among themselves on various issues.

"The only problem you cannot forecast is what the president of the United States will do depending on the mood, the need to be in the news," said Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, AP reports.