Macron Praises Trump Peace Deal As G7 Leaders Scramble To Respond

President Donald Trump arrived at the 52nd G7 Leaders Summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, on Monday, June 15, in the strongest diplomatic position of any American president arriving at a G7 in years.

Less than 24 hours after announcing a framework peace deal with Iran that sent global oil prices plummeting and stock markets to record highs, Trump walked into a summit of the world’s leading industrialized nations with something his fellow heads of government, several of whom had spent weeks criticizing his management of the American-Iranian conflict, were struggling to explain away: results.

The summit, hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Hotel Royal on the shores of Lake Geneva, runs through June 17 and has immediately been dominated by the twin crises of the Iran war and Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine, with Trump at the center of both.

Macron set the tone immediately.

At the start of Trump’s bilateral meeting with the French president Monday, Macron congratulated Trump on finding a path to an agreement, calling it a very important step for peace for the whole world.

Coming from the leader of a country that had been among the most vocal European critics of American unilateralism in the conflict, the acknowledgment was notable.

Macron has consistently pushed for multilateral engagement with Iran and has been skeptical of the military-first approach the Trump administration adopted in late February.

The peace deal did not erase those differences, but it made them harder to sustain in public.

This is Trump’s fifth G7 summit and second since returning to the presidency in January 2025.

He is one of the most experienced leaders in the room.

Macron is at his tenth summit.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae round out the principal members, along with the European Union represented by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council President Antonio Costa.

France has expanded the meeting to include outreach partners, among them Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who attended at Macron’s invitation for sessions focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as leaders from Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Syria, India, Brazil, South Korea, and Kenya.

Trump walked into the summit having already spoken Sunday with both Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin in separate phone calls.

He indicated to reporters Monday that with the Iran situation resolved, his focus would shift toward Ukraine.

Now that this is finished, he said, we are going to be focusing on that.

Trump has long indicated his belief that the Russia-Ukraine war is diplomatically solvable and that the right combination of pressure and incentives on both sides could produce a settlement.

Whether Zelensky’s presence at Evian creates a moment for direct bilateral engagement with Trump remains uncertain.

As of Monday, no formal Trump-Zelensky meeting was on the official schedule, though Zelensky himself offered to meet with Putin at the summit, an overture the Russian leader rejected earlier this month.

Russia fired hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles at Ukraine’s largest cities in a massive overnight barrage that killed 11 people and destroyed a religious landmark, hours before the G7’s formal sessions opened Tuesday.

The attack came as G7 leaders gathered to discuss Ukraine’s security, a timing that senior officials read as a deliberate statement from Moscow.

Von der Leyen told reporters in Evian that Ukraine was holding the front line and in some places regaining territory, and praised the country’s development of drone technology and its capacity to strike strategic targets deep inside Russian territory.

Trump’s response to the attack and to European pressure for stronger American support for Ukraine will be among the most closely watched elements of the summit’s remaining sessions.

The Iran deal dominated the summit’s opening day in ways that complicated the traditional format.

G7 gatherings typically produce agreed communiques on the major issues before the leaders, a process that requires weeks of preparation by teams of officials known as sherpas. The emergence of the Iran peace framework in the 24 hours before the summit opened scrambled those preparations significantly. The memorandum’s signing ceremony is not scheduled until June 19 in Geneva, two days after the G7 concludes. That means the summit is being asked to respond to a deal that has been announced but not yet formally executed, a situation that creates particular challenges for European leaders who want to express support for the peace process without appearing to ratify terms they have not fully reviewed.

Britain and France are the G7 members most directly relevant to the deal’s immediate implementation. Both countries have expressed willingness to contribute naval vessels to the mine clearance operation in the Strait of Hormuz, which is expected to begin shortly after the Geneva signing ceremony. A senior American administration official told reporters over the weekend that once the deal goes forward, there is much the other G7 countries have said they could do. The official confirmed that Britain and France may be able to have ships in the Strait to help with its reopening and the removal of mines.

The demining of the Strait of Hormuz is a serious logistical undertaking. The Strait is one of the world’s most heavily transited waterways, and the presence of mines in shipping lanes creates genuine navigational hazards that cannot simply be declared cleared by diplomatic announcement. British and French naval forces have experience with mine countermeasures, and American commanders have indicated they welcome allied participation in what will be a multi-week clearance effort even after the formal ceasefire takes effect. The working lunch on Tuesday in Evian is focused specifically on the Hormuz reopening, including the possible Franco-British maritime mission and the identification of alternative energy routes that bypass the Strait during the clearance period.

Trump pushed back on European leaders for their lack of support during the conflict itself. He has been vocal since late February in his frustration that NATO allies provided rhetorical sympathy but limited material assistance to the American and Israeli campaign against Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure. That frustration was evident in the Evian arrival, where administration officials made clear that Trump believed the results spoke for themselves and that European hesitancy during the conflict had not ultimately changed its outcome. The peace deal, Trump’s argument goes, was achieved by American strength and Israeli resolve, not by European multilateral diplomacy, and the G7’s enthusiasm for the result should be calibrated against the reality that its members were largely spectators during the conflict.

The tariff dimension of the summit adds a separate layer of tension. The Trump administration’s 15 percent universal import tariff, applied to goods from virtually every trading partner including G7 members, is legally set to expire on July 24 unless Congress acts to extend it or replace it with something permanent. European leaders, particularly Macron and Merz, have made clear that they view the tariff regime as damaging to transatlantic economic relations and want the G7 to produce some framework for its resolution. Trump has given no indication he regards the tariff deadline as his problem. He has consistently framed the tariffs as a negotiating tool and pointed to indicators of American economic strength as evidence they are working.

A separate crisis loomed over the summit’s third major theme, critical minerals. European nations have been scrambling to reduce their dependence on Chinese rare earth elements and critical minerals essential for electric vehicles, semiconductors, and defense production. France was hoping to use the G7 platform to establish some form of multilateral secretariat or coordination mechanism for critical mineral supply chain diversification. The Trump administration’s position on multilateral economic coordination has been skeptical throughout the second term, and whether the Evian summit produces any binding agreement on critical minerals remained uncertain as of Tuesday.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s presence as an outreach partner gave Trump a significant bilateral opportunity. The two leaders share a rapport that has been described as genuine by officials from both governments, and trade negotiations between the United States and India have been among the more productive of the Trump administration’s second term. Indian firms have been positioning themselves as alternative suppliers in supply chains that American policy has been actively redirecting away from China, and the strategic relationship between Washington and New Delhi has strengthened considerably under Trump’s second term.

Trump also confirmed meetings with the leaders of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, all of which participated as outreach partners. These conversations will inevitably touch on the Iran deal’s implications for the broader Gulf region, where the American-Iranian conflict had generated significant anxiety among Sunni Arab governments that welcomed the weakening of Iranian power but worried about the instability a prolonged war might produce. The UAE and Qatar are particularly significant, given their roles in hosting American military facilities that were directly relevant to the conflict’s conduct and their positions as major energy exporters affected by the Strait’s closure.

The atmosphere in Evian-les-Bains itself is one of careful diplomacy mixed with the underlying tensions that have characterized Trump’s relationships with European leaders throughout his second term. Surveys published by the European Council on Foreign Relations showed that only 11 percent of Europeans currently view the United States as an ally, a figure that is lower than at any point in recent memory and that reflects the accumulated friction over tariffs, NATO burden sharing, the management of the Iran war, and the general character of Trump’s diplomatic style. Those numbers are not lost on European leaders who must balance genuine policy differences with the practical reality that American power remains indispensable to European security.

The Evian setting itself carries historical resonance that is not incidental to the summit’s dynamics. The town of Evian-les-Bains sits on the shores of Lake Geneva, the same body of water that has hosted some of the most significant diplomatic negotiations of the 20th century. The Hotel Royal, where the summit is taking place, hosted the G7 in 2003 under French President Jacques Chirac, another moment when a French-American relationship was strained by disagreement over Middle Eastern military policy. History does not repeat exactly, but the setting invited comparison.

Trump is scheduled to depart the summit on Wednesday, June 17, the final day of the formal program. Whether the Evian summit produces a joint statement or only a chairman’s summary reflecting the disagreements that make consensus impossible will be determined by the sherpas working through the night in the hotel corridors. What will not be determined in Evian is whether the Iran peace deal holds, whether the nuclear negotiations that follow produce a durable settlement, and whether the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz marks the beginning of a new chapter in American-Iranian relations. Those are questions for June 19 in Geneva and for the months that follow.

What is already clear at Evian is that Trump arrived with momentum that his fellow G7 leaders were not expecting him to have. A president who had been facing sustained criticism for the economic costs of the Iran conflict, for the domestic impact of tariffs, and for a broader management style that European partners find difficult walked into France with an announced peace deal, record American stock market highs, and falling oil prices in his pocket.