KANANASKIS, Alberta: Leaders of some of the world’s biggest economic are arriving in the Canadian Rockies on Sunday for a Group of Seven summit, overshadowed by an escalating conflict between Israel and Iran and US President Donald Trump’s unresolved trade war.
Israel’s strikes on Iran and Tehran’s retaliation, which appeared to catch many world leaders unawares, is the latest sign of a more volatile world.
Trump in recent days vetoed an Israeli plan to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a US official told The Associated Press, in an indication of how far Israel was prepared to go.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he had discussed efforts to de-escalate the crisis with Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as other world leaders and said he expected “intense discussions” would continue at the summit.
Trump is summit’s wild card
As summit host, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has decided to abandon the annual practice of issuing a joint statement, or communique, at the end of the meeting.
With other leaders wanting to talk to Trump in an effort to talk him out of imposing tariffs, the summit risks being a series of bilateral conversations rather than a show of unity.
Trump is the summit wild card. Looming over the meeting are his inflammatory threats to make Canada the 51st state and take over Greenland. French President Emmanuel Macron visited Greenland on Sunday for a highly symbolic stop on his way to Canada. Macron warned that Greenland is “not to be sold” nor “to be taken.”
“Everybody in France, the European Union thinks that Greenland is not to be sold, not to be taken,” he said during a news conference, applauded by the local crowd.
“The situation in Greenland is clearly a wakeup call for all Europeans. Let me tell you very directly that you’re not alone,” Macron added.
Trump is scheduled to arrive late Sunday in Kananaskis, Alberta. He will have a bilateral meeting with Carney on Monday morning before the summit program begins.
‘He tends to be a bully’
Leaders who are not part of the G7 but have been invited to the summit by Carney include the heads of state of India, Ukraine, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Australia, Mexico and the UAE. Avoiding tariffs will continue to be top of mind.
“Leaders, and there are some new ones coming, will want to meet Donald Trump,” said Peter Boehm, Canada’s counselor at the 2018 G7 summit in Quebec and a veteran of six G7 summits. “Trump doesn’t like the big round table as much he likes the one-on-one.”
Bilateral meetings with the American president can be fraught as Trump has used them to try to intimidate the leaders of Ukraine and South Africa.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien told a panel this week that if Trump does act out, leaders should ignore him and remain calm like Carney did in his recent Oval Office meeting.
“He tends to be a bully,” Chrétien said. “If Trump has decided to make a show to be in the news, he will do something crazy. Let him do it and keep talking normally.”
Last month Britain and the US announced they had struck a trade deal that will slash American tariffs on UK autos, steel and aluminum. It has yet to take effect, however, though British officials say they are not concerned the Trump administration might go back on its word.
Starmer’s attempts to woo Trump have left him in an awkward position with Canada, the UK’s former colony, close ally and fellow Commonwealth member. Starmer has also drawn criticism — especially from Canadians — for failing to address Trump’s stated desire to make Canada the 51st state.
Asked if he has told Trump to stop the 51st state threats, Starmer told The Associated Press: “I’m not going to get into the precise conversations I’ve had, but let me be absolutely clear: Canada is an independent, sovereign country and a much-valued member of the Commonwealth.”
Zelensky expected to meet Trump
The war in Ukraine will be on the agenda. President Volodymyr Zelensky is due to attend the summit and is expected to meet with Trump, a reunion coming just months after their bruising Oval Office encounter which laid bare the risks of having a meeting with the US president.
Starmer met with Carney in Ottawa before the summit for talks focused on security and trade, in the first visit to Canada by a British prime minister for eight years.
German officials were keen to counter the suggestion that the summit would be a “six against one” event, noting that the G7 countries have plenty of differences of emphasis among themselves on various issues.
“The only the problem you cannot forecast is what the president of the United States will do depending on the mood, the need to be in the news,” said Chrétien.

The assassination of a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States.
The list, in the past two months alone: the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages, and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania’s governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside.
And here’s just a sampling of some other attacks before that — the killing of a health care executive on the streets of New York late last year, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in small-town Pennsylvania during his presidential campaign last year, the 2022 attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories, and the 2017 shooting by a liberal gunman at a GOP practice for the congressional softball game.
“We’ve entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,” said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies extremism. “A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.”
Politics behind both individual shootings and massacres
Politics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews were trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right who support Trump’s push to limit immigration.
The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Daesh group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police.
“You’re seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,” said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. “It feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.”
The United States has a long and grim history of political violence, from presidential assassinations dating back to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, lynching and violence aimed at Black people in the South, the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the past few years, however, have most likely reached a level not seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when icons like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
Ware noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has shuttered units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally.
“We’re at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,” Ware said.
Of course, one of Trump’s first acts in office was to pardon those involved in the largest act of domestic political violence this century — the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol, intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Those pardons broadcast a signal to would-be extremists on either side of the political debate, Dallek said: “They sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you’re a Trump supporter, will be permitted and may be rewarded.”
Ideologies aren’t always aligned — or coherent
Often, those who engage in political violence don’t have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country’s partisan divides. A man who died after he detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month left writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called “nihilistic ideations.”
But, like clockwork, each political attack seems to inspire partisans to find evidence the attacker is on the other side. Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as flyers for the day’s anti-Trump parades.
Conservatives online seized on the flyers — and the fact that Boetler had apparently once been appointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — to claim the suspect must be a liberal. “The far left is murderously violent,” billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X.
It was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker’s then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: “Where is Nancy?!”
On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. “All of us must remember that it’s not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,” she wrote.
Trump had mocked the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, but on Saturday he joined in the official bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them “horrific violence.” The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric toward his political opponents, whom he routinely calls “sick” and “evil,” and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests.
The Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration’s immigration operations in Los Angeles during the past week, when he pledged to “HIT” disrespectful protesters and warned of a “migrant invasion” of the city.
Dallek said Trump has been “both a victim and an accelerant” of the charged, dehumanizing political rhetoric that is flooding the country.
“It feels as if the extremists are in the saddle,” he said, “and the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.”