Kirton: Promising Prelude to Evian’s Significant Performance

Analytical Studies > Analysis on the 2026 Evian Summit
G7 Summits > 2026 Evian Summit > Road to the 2026 Evian Summit

Promising Prelude to Evian’s Significant Performance

John Kirton, G7 Research Group
June 14, 2026

On Sunday, June 14, the day before then G7’s Evian Summit began, the world awoke to news that promised the summit would indeed produce a significant performance.

The White House confirmed that President Donald Trump was coming. It released his detailed itinerary there, showing that he would stay for the entire three-day summit, attend all the sessions, and end with a bilateral dinner with French president Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles on the evening of June 17. Trump was scheduled to attend the opening dinner with his fellow G7 leaders only on the evening of June 15, then their session with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy next morning, and then the outreach sessions with the leaders of India, Brazil, South Korea, Kenya, Egypt, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and end with the G7 summit’s first-ever summit with CEOs, here from the leading artificial intelligence firms. During this time Trump was also scheduled to hold bilateral meetings with the leaders of France, Qatar, UAE, Egypt and India.

Trump’s three days at Evian and Paris was three times as many as he had spent at the previous G7 summit at the start of his second term. At the June 2025 G7 summit in Kananaskis, Canada, he stayed for the full G7-only summit on the first day, but then left that night before the session with the outreach leaders the next day, so he could return to Washington to prepare to launch his first war against Iran a few days later.

Trump’s second war against Iran, which he launched on February 28, this year, was the second source of good news for Evian’s success. For the US and Iran had stopped shooting at each other for a second day, and their tentative peace deal was even closer to being agreed, signed and announced. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reported to have accepted the deal, including its provisions on Lebanon. And some G7 leaders reaffirmed that they would indeed send their warships to help ensure that the Strait of Hormuz would stay open, once a durable ceasefire was in place.

More broadly, Japan’s Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae said she would attend the summit of North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders in Ankara, Turkey, on July 7–8. This meant that Japan’s leaders would be party of the annual NATO summits for five years in a row, making them a G7-centered centre of global defences and hard power security governance in many ways. Together with the expanded list of guest leaders at Evian, now arranged in several categories, this meant that the G7 summit was its leaders trusted club, at the hub of a growing network of global summit governance for a much troubled world.

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	Please send comments to: g7@utoronto.ca This page was last updated June 14, 2026.