By Lisa Van Dusen

June 18, 2025

If diplomacy, as influence impresario Henry Kissinger once said, is “the art of restraining power”, then Mark Carney’s first G7 was a success.

As host of the most bizarre gathering of the group in its half-century history based on the attendance of Donald Trump as an American president whose entire second term has been an homage to unrestrained power, Carney had two tactical jobs.

In the ongoing battle of systemic narratives, the first was to pre-empt any remotely credible spin portraying the G7 as dead based on a classic Trumpian catastrophe whose propaganda rollers would have blamed the guests rather than the skunk at the garden party.

Aside from the PR victory that would have delivered to the interests Trump serves as the America-degrading gift that keeps on giving, you really don’t want to be the new Canadian prime minister whose first diplomatic outing was to preside over the immolation of the G7 by Donald Trump.

Trump’s early departure from Alberta, ostensibly to return to Washington to manage the US response to escalating hostilities between Israel and Iran, was not that catastrophe; it was the pre-emption of that catastrophe.

As some have said of Trump’s G7 exit, it could have been worse. Yes, he could’ve stayed.

As it was, Trump’s pre-finale exit was the best possible outcome for the G7, and Carney’s job was securing the best possible outcome for the G7 as a political, geopolitical and existential imperative.

The G7 was expanded from the original G6 with the addition of Canada in 1975, then reduced in 2014 from the G8 after 16 years of post-Soviet Russian membership. The only reason an adjustment now would be surprising is that the subtracted country would be the United States, the founding member.

Trump’s pre-finale exit was the best possible outcome for the G7, and Carney’s job was securing the best possible outcome for the G7 as a political, geopolitical and existential imperative.

In his second term, Donald Trump has relentlessly used America’s status as a superpower to degrade America’s status as a superpower and his role as president of the United States to degrade the presidency of the United States. Meanwhile, the longstanding power dynamic within the same international order he consistently undermines has compelled America’s legacy allies to continue treating the United States with greater respect than that displayed by its own president.

As Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne said of Trump in his post-G7 piece arguing for a return to the G6, “He is fundamentally opposed to everything the G7 stands for, including the G7.”

So, Carney’s responsibility in Kananaskis was neither to defer to nor humour a volatile player with a perpetual disruption agenda, it was to restrain the power of that player so that the damage done to the institution of the G7 could be contained.

There’s a reason why diplomacy doesn’t easily lend itself to sports analogies. It has no scoreboard because it’s an ongoing, perpetual state of affairs, occasionally amplified by a thematic process with a beginning, middle and end. And the talent and creativity that define it as the art of restraining power are applied mostly beyond public view, often in ways that are later belied by bargained concessions to face-saving.

In the case of this G7, it wasn’t the burden of the six rational-actor members to accommodate a performative autocrat, which is why there was no final communiqué — by no means unprecedented in the group’s history — and no joint statement on Ukraine.

The portrayal of those two outcomes as failures of the G7 when there was no expectation of a final communiqué and no serious possibility of a joint statement on Ukraine given Trump’s dictatorial affinity for the invading party in that war is akin to the diplomacy-coverage ritual of defaulting to a “no breakthrough” headline when a breakthrough was neither remotely possible nor expected.

How does one conduct diplomacy with an interlocutor who uses novelty-hat nationalism as a front for strategic self-sabotage? Whose contempt for both truth and treaties makes their word and signature worthless? How does one collaborate on trade and security questions with a long-enmeshed, economically integrated partner who has suddenly become seemingly bent on not only your entirely avoidable economic decimation but their own?

As long as Trump remains in office, the G7 should remain the G7 but perhaps have Australia — a strategically asymmetrical, democratic ally and regional security pillar whose physical remove makes it appealingly pre-restrained by location — replace the US as the 7th member. Next year in Evian.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.