The G7 summit opened on Monday in Évian-les-Bains, France, hours after President Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran. The timing is significant: the summit that was originally planned around economic growth, supply chain resilience, AI, and immigration has been overtaken by the fallout of a six-month conflict that none of the European G7 members fully endorsed and all of them have paid a price for. Trump is scheduled to meet President Macron bilaterally and to hold a working session with President Zelenskyy and G7 leaders on Ukraine. On the eve of the summit, anti-G7 protesters in Geneva clashed with police, smashing windows and setting a car alight; officers deployed tear gas and water cannon. The formal backdrop to these events is a ceasefire MOU awaiting a signing ceremony in Switzerland on Friday — a document that will define what Western diplomacy now means.
The received wisdom
The dominant liberal commentary on this summit will focus on alliance resilience: that despite Trump’s withdrawal and partial reversal of more than 5,000 US troops from Germany, despite months of transatlantic friction over the Iran war, the G7 is still meeting, still deliberating, and still capable of coordinating on post-ceasefire reconstruction. The fact that the UK and France are already building a coalition for demining the Strait of Hormuz — a genuinely technical and dangerous multilateral task — is cited as evidence that European strategic autonomy, long discussed and rarely realised, may finally be taking material form. Former EU foreign policy adviser Nathalie Tocci has argued that “the Europeans are in a much better place now than they were a year ago” and that “there is less bending of the knee going on.” On this reading, the crisis has been pedagogically useful for the transatlantic alliance: it has forced Europe to invest in its own defence, to coordinate its own energy resilience, and to develop diplomatic capacity it previously outsourced to Washington.
A different read
There is something to that view, but it tends to flatter European institutions at the expense of honest accounting. The Europeans were not in a “better place” because they chose to be; they were in a better place because American volatility made the cost of dependence visible in ways it had not been since the 1970s. That is a reactive adaptation, not a strategic revolution. And the adaptation has come at enormous economic cost. The UK is the advanced economy most exposed to the Strait of Hormuz disruption, according to the IMF. Germany’s export-dependent industrial base has taken a further hit from energy price surges. The French political coalition that Macron assembled has held — barely — but the strain is visible. The G7’s legitimacy rests partly on the claim that these are the world’s most capable democracies, coordinating effectively. What the Iran crisis has revealed is how much coordination depends on American restraint, and how fragile that assumption always was.
The protest violence in Geneva the night before the summit is worth reading as a social text, not merely a public order problem. Anti-G7 demonstrations have a long history — from Genoa in 2001 to Heiligendamm in 2007 — and they have never been purely about the summit’s specific agenda. They express a broader alienation from technocratic governance, from the idea that seven leaders meeting in an Alpine resort hotel can manage the world’s problems. After a war that disrupted global energy supplies, pushed oil from $70 to $87 a barrel, and contracted at least one major G7 economy, that alienation has more material substance than usual. The protester quoted by the BBC who expressed “disappointment at the violence” while insisting on “the basic message regarding all these countries that oppress us through money and power” is voicing something that does not map neatly onto either the left-wing or right-wing critiques of globalisation — it is a generalised loss of faith in the capacity of international institutions to manage consequences.
The historical parallel that comes to mind is the 1975 Rambouillet summit, where the first G6 met in the aftermath of the first oil shock, the fall of Saigon, and the convulsions of stagflation. That summit was born of crisis and it established a format for managing great-power coordination that has lasted, with modifications, for fifty years. Évian may be a comparable inflection point: the first summit of the post-Iran-war order, with a ceasefire just signed and a global energy architecture to be rebuilt. Whether the G7 format is adequate to that task — whether it is the right forum for demining coalitions, nuclear negotiations, and reconstruction finance — is a genuine question. It was designed for an era of relatively stable American leadership. That era may have ended.
Brett Bruen, a former NSC official, put the challenge plainly: “[i]f the United States can’t contain the fallout from a military operation of our choice against a single country, that at best is a middling power.” That is a harsh assessment, but it is not an unfair one. A ceasefire reached after six months of economic disruption to the US’s own allies, with oil still well above pre-war prices, with no published details on Iran’s nuclear programme, is not a clean strategic victory. It is a necessary off-ramp from a costly situation. Managing its aftermath — at Évian, in Switzerland on Friday, and in the months of post-war diplomacy that follow — is the harder work.
What to watch
- The bilateral Trump-Macron meeting: whether France extracts concrete commitments on Strait demining, European defence burden-sharing, or Ukraine aid continuity. A vague joint communiqué would signal that the transatlantic fractures remain unresolved.
- Zelenskyy’s working session: with a ceasefire in Iran and oil prices beginning to ease, the question of whether attention and resources return to Ukraine becomes urgent. Any weakening of G7 language on Russia sanctions or military support would be significant.
- The demining coalition announcement: who commits troops and resources, and under whose command. This will be the first concrete test of post-war European strategic coordination.
- The protest dynamic: whether violence continues through the summit and whether European governments respond with security crackdowns or political engagement. Neither response is cost-free.
— J