US president Donald Trump has postponed the Group of Seven summit that he wanted to hold in June and will also expand the list of countries invited to attend the rescheduled event to include Australia, Russia, South Korea and India.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One during his return to Washington from Cape Canaveral in Florida, Trump said the G7 in its current format was a “very outdated group of countries”.
“I’m postponing it because I don’t feel that as a G7 it properly represents what’s going on in the world,” Trump said.
The decision was a dramatic pivot for Trump, who had sought to host the group of major industrialised countries in Washington as a demonstration that the US was returning to normal after the coronavirus epidemic, which has killed more than 103,000 Americans to date.
Trump said he had not yet set a new date for the meeting, but thought the gathering could take place in September, around the time of the annual meeting of the United Nations in New York, or perhaps after the US election in November.
The G7 is currently made up of the US, Italy, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Britain and the European Union.
Doubts about whether it would go ahead as planned grew when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Saturday that she would not attend a face-to-face meeting in the US unless the course of the pandemic had changed by then.
Merkel suggested she had not yet made up her mind on whether to attend in person or by video conference, but her office said she had made a decision.
“As of today, given the overall pandemic situation, she cannot commit to participating in person,” her office said. It added that the chancellor would continue to monitor the coronavirus situation in case things changed.
Trump had already cancelled the summit set to take place on 10-12 June at Camp David because of the pandemic. But Trump said a week ago that he was considering rescheduling an in-person meeting of world leaders because it would be a “great sign to all” of things returning to normal during the pandemic.
source https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/donald-trump-postpones-g7-summit-and-signals-wider-attendance-list-in-future
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