Encourage, Support, Cajole: How Boris Johnson Is Preparing To Woo Trump At His First G7 Summit As British PM

G5 PLUS 2?

Johnson’s arrival as the new kid on the global block is happening just as some big players are leaving.

This G7 could well be the last one for Canada’s Justin Trudeau, who is behind in the polls ahead of his country’s election this autumn. It will certainly be the last one for Giuseppe Conte, who quit as Italy’s PM last week.

In contrast, Trump’s presence, or rather his absence strategically on many issues, looms large over the Biarritz summit.

In his first G7 in 2017, he announced he was pulling out of the Paris climate change agreement that commits nations to cutting greenhouse gases.

During last year’s meeting in Canada, he walked out early, then tore up the planned ‘communique’ by tweeting that Trudeau was “dishonest and weak”.

British officials are acutely aware that Macron is himself a former summit ‘sherpa’, and as a key adviser to Francois Hollande spent late nights wrangling over the detailed clauses and subclauses of previous agreements.

In a clear bid to avoid any Canada-style meltdowns by Trump, the French president has decided to ditch the whole idea of having a communique to end the summit.

“We have to adapt formats. There will be no final communiqué, but coalitions, commitments and follow-ups. We must assume that, on one subject or another, a member of the club might not sign up.” 

Everyone knew that ‘member of the club’ was Trump. Macron tried to take the edge of things by joking, ”no one reads the communiqués, let’s be honest,” 

The UK is still expecting a raft of different texts to emerge from the summit, with possibly a ‘chair’s statement’ from Macron on things like climate change and gender equality. There could well be a ‘Biarritz Declaration’ on things like anti-terror operations in Africa and a new ‘strategy’ on artificial intelligence.

The US President may sign up to some specific statements, but summit veterans say it’s impossible to predict just what he will do on the day.

Having built up a close rapport with Johnson – the pair have had four conversations in four weeks (more than Theresa May managed for nearly a year) – Trump is expecting his new-found friend not to cause him problems this weekend.

Talk of the G7 being replaced by a ‘G5 plus two’ (with Trump and Johnson allying in key areas) is overdone, insiders say. Yet the pair will clearly show how much they’ve bonded, and the PM will not go out of his way to criticise the president directly even on key areas of disagreement.

On Iran, the UK is set to be ultra-diplomatic, aware that Trump won’t budge at the summit from his opposition to the Obama era nuclear deal.

Johnson won’t support America’s policy of applying more sanctions, but in Biarritz there will be an attempt to paper over the differences by stressing shared ‘objectives’ such as stopping Teheran from acquiring a nuclear capacity and countering its ‘aggression’ in the wider region. Fresh moves to resume dialogue could also be made.

On the issue of Chinese firm Huawei and the UK’s 5G network, which Trump has raised in recent phone calls with the PM, Britain’s stance is nuanced. While its managed risk approach remains, it has decided not to proceed yet with any decisions until it becomes clearer how America’s ‘blacklisting’ of the company plays out.

On climate change, neither Johnson nor Macron expect Trump to suddenly sign up to the Paris accord this weekend. Influenced in part by his father’s lifelong links to conservation, Johnson has made ‘biodiversity’ an early priority of his premiership.

It is seen by some insiders as a smarter way to get Trump’s attention on the environment, by playing to his own calls for ‘clean air and clean water’. By talking about the need to protect ‘precious habitats’, from the Artic to the Amazon, Johnson’s allies think he can focus also on concrete issues like the US’s own emissions targets, not just global targets in the Paris accord.

Encouraging, supporting and cajoling is how Britain sees its role on Trump and climate change more widely, HuffPost UK understands.

On ‘tech taxes’, which Macron has put on the G7 agenda, the UK may take a similarly unconfrontational approach to Washington. The UK is still consulting on former Chancellor Philip Hammond’s ‘digital services tax’ plan, but it will stress at the summit that it is a temporary, targeted and proportionate move that is still subject to business responses.

It will be fascinating to see if Johnson drops his previous tough language on the issue. During the Tory leadership hustings he attacked “the internet giants, the FANGs – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google” for paying “virtually nothing” in tax.

Trump’s furious reaction to France’s own unilateral tech tax has been salutary, as he threatened a tit-for-tat tax on French wine imports. Perhaps underlining that the President is just a brasher voice of raw American interests, he has received rare support from Google and Facebook, as well as Democrats.

“You expect a trade agreement with the United States and the UK. It will not happen with your digital services tax. Period. Full stop’,” senator Ron Wyden, the leading Democrat on the Senate finance committee has said.