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U.S. President Donald Trump and Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney talk during a family photo at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, June 16, 2025.
What We’re Watching: Trump and Carney to discuss Canada tariffs, Macron under pressure to resign
Carney heads to Washington, seeking tariff relief from Trump
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will meet President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday seeking relief from US tariffs that have hit key exports. It comes after Trump threatened to impose an additional 25% tariff on trucks entering the country on Monday, a move that would significantly disrupt the auto industry's supply chains. Trump has already imposed a 35% tariff on Canadian goods, citing disputed claims about migration and fentanyl. Hopes for progress today are low, but as next year’s North American trade deal review is looming, Carney aims to preserve ties with the US president while strengthening them with Mexico to increase Canada’s leverage.
France’s Macron under pressure to step down
L’etat, c’est.. en émoi? France is in political turmoil as pressure grows on President Emmanuel Macron to resign or call snap elections. Yesterday, France’s fifth Prime Minister in two years resigned just hours after forming his cabinet. Europe’s second largest economy has been deadlocked since a 2024 snap election resulted in a hung parliament. The centrist Macron has long been under pressure from the surging far right National Rally, as well as from a left wing coalition that effectively prevented the far right from winning even bigger in 2024. But now mainstream allies are breaking with him too. Will Macron make it to the end of his term in 2027?
Is the US Intelligence community at a breaking point?
With Congress slowing down during the summer recess and President Trump fresh off some major victories—from a joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure to pushing through a massive tax and spending bill—Ian Bremmer heads to Capitol Hill to hear how Democrats are responding on the latest episode of GZERO World. Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, is sounding the alarm about a deeper crisis: an intelligence system being weaponized for politics. “Analysts are being told to change their conclusions—or lose their jobs,” he says. “We’re in uncharted, dangerous territory.”
Finally, Warner spotlights a crisis few in Washington are talking about: Sudan. “More people die there every day than in Gaza and Ukraine combined,” he says. If Trump leverages his ties to the Saudis and UAE to stop funding the war, Warner believes it could be a rare and meaningful win.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
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U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the entrance of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 7, 2025.
What We’re Watching: Bibi heads to Washington, Deadly Texas floods get political, Kenyan police shoot protesters
Bibi’s back in Washington
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets US President Donald Trump at the White House this evening, their third encounter there this year. Trump is pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza, after claiming Friday that a 60-day deal could be reached, in which Hamas would return 10 living and 18 dead hostages, Israeli forces would withdraw to a buffer zone along Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt, and aid would be distributed again by UN agencies and the Palestinian Red Crescent. As of this writing, however, indirect talks between Israel and Hamas were still ongoing.
Killer floods sweep through Texas
Even as rescuers are still searching for survivors of the Texas floods that have so far killed more than 80 people, including many children, the political finger pointing has begun. Homeland Security Kristi Noem blamed outdated National Weather Service systems, while critics say federal workforce cuts – including to weather forecasting agencies – have weakened disaster preparedness and left communities more vulnerable to catastrophic weather events.
Kenya’s police open fire on anti-government protesters
Police are cracking down on mass protests marking the 35th anniversary of Kenya’s return to democracy. Demonstrators and rioters – angry about cost of living, corruption, and police brutality – are calling for the resignation of President William Ruto, who won the 2022 election. Ruto’s alliance with the main opposition group has so far been a bulwark against anger from the streets – could that change? The next election is set for 2027.
Will the Trump-Musk relationship last?
How long will President Donald Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk last? The alliance has so far defied predictions from the left (and parts of the right) that a relationship between two famously impulsive and mercurial billionaires would eventually lead to conflict. Instead, Musk is everywhere in the Trump administration—attending cabinet meetings, shaking hands with world leaders, smiling in the Oval Office. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has embedded itself across nearly every federal agency. In many ways, the relationship is mutually beneficial: Musk has an almost limitless checkbook to bankroll Trump’s political operations, and DOGE is helping him deliver on a campaign pledge to “shatter” the deep state. Meanwhile, Musk has become the most powerful person in Washington, not named Trump. But the president also has a history of discarding allies when they are no longer valuable and many of his close advisors have become his harshest critics. So, can the Trump-Musk alliance survive for the long haul, or is it destined to go up in flames?
Watch the upcoming episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on US public television this weekend (check local listings) and at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld.
Trump through the looking glass
The shocking US pivot to Russia has sent the world through the political looking glass and into the upside-down era of Trumpland. Is the US abandoning its historic allies in NATO, Europe, and Canada in favor of … Russia?
The short answer is yes. For now.
Let’s start with exhibit A: the inversion of facts to justify the abandonment of Ukraine.
President Donald Trump has, to steal a Lewis Carroll phrase by the QAnon movement, followed the white rabbit down the disinformation hole. According to him, Ukraine started the war, not Russia. “You should’ve never started it,” Trump said this week about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “You could’ve made a deal.”
Wait, what?
Didn’t the war start when Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea in 2014? Didn’t it escalate when he invaded the country — three years ago this Saturday — in February 2022, bombing cities and trying to assassinate Zelensky?
Those are the facts that NATO nations have long accepted … because they are true. Putin was the dictator who started the war, and Zelensky the defender of democracy.
Not for Trump.
He now calls Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections,” not Putin. Parroting Russian propaganda, Trump claims that Zelensky has only 4% support in his country and so has no standing to be part of the peace negotiations.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice said, gazing around the new world of Wonderland. This just doesn’t make much sense.
Once you go through the political looking glass, the flow of disinformation threatens to overwhelm reality. Fact-checking is suddenly seen as a radical form of partisanship, but it shouldn’t be. Facts are facts. The truth is, in the last presidential election, Zelensky won 73% of the vote. It is also true that, since then, the war and martial law in Ukraine delayed the elections that were scheduled for last May, and concerns about that are legitimate. But as the UK prime minister pointed out, during World War II, Britain also suspended elections.
Zelensky responded in fury, saying that Trump “lives in this disinformation space.”
Europe is reeling at the pivot — suddenly aware that their closest ally and friend has shifted toward Russia. European leaders, who have been holding a series of emergency meetings, are now realizing that if they want to defend themselves from Russia, they have to do it themselves. It’s not so much a wake-up call as a lifesaving shock from a political defibrillator. But it will be expensive and fraught with internal obstacles.
The sense of betrayal in the EU is overwhelming. Kaja Kallas, vice president of the European Commission, described this as “appeasement,” while Friedrich Merz, the man most likely to lead Germany after Sunday’s election, called it “a classic reversal of the role of perpetrator and victim.”
Even former British Prime Minster Boris Johnson, who supports the idea of helping Trump end the war, couldn’t defend the absurdity of Trump’s view. “Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor,” he wrote.
The truth is that European leaders are in full panic, watching the postwar multilateral world they worked so hard to build on the foundation of US support collapse.
Meanwhile, the Russians aren’t just throwing a Lewis Carroll-like tea party but a Kremlin-sponsored vodka chug-a-thon. The Russians have long courted far-right MAGA types like Tucker Carlson through their common interest in fighting “woke” culture and promoting Christian nationalism — all while maintaining their focus on weakening NATO and breaking up the alliance. Even they can’t believe their success.
“If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president wrote, not bothering to hide his gloating. “Trump is 200 percent right.”
“He is the first, and so far, in my opinion, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the impudent line of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, cementing Russian propaganda as a Trumpian truth.
As I argued last week, this is part of Trump’s empire state of mind, his neo-imperialist goal of dividing the world into spheres of influence controlled by strongman leaders in countries like Russia and China. China is seeing all this through the lens of invading Taiwan, something that must look far more palatable to the current US administration as it retreats from its role as a global police officer and looks increasingly likely to join the mob looting weaker sovereign territories. Small countries who get in the way — Ukraine in this case, the Panamanians in another, and maybe Taiwan — have little or no say in the outcomes.
Other countries that have been threatened by Trump, like Canada, are watching nervously. After all, the propaganda Putin uses to talk about Ukraine — there is an artificial border where one never should have existed, that Ukrainians actually want Russia to come and protect them — sounds eerily familiar to the language Trump has used about Canada. He has called the US-Canada border an “artificially drawn line” and claimed, without proof, that most Canadians would welcome the US taking over the country to offer protection.
Earlier today, just hours before the 4 Nations hockey final between the US and Canada, Trump made it political. The event has been supercharged by the political climate to the point where Canadian fans booed the US national anthem during a round-robin matchup last weekend in Montreal. Expect the Canadian anthem to receive a similar treatment tonight in Boston. “I’ll be calling our GREAT American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished, and very important, Fifty First State,” Trump posted.
The threats are by now familiar, but the pivot toward Russia adds a more concerning element. Once he went through the looking glass and accepted the lie that Ukraine started the war, Trump implicitly accepted the idea that a manufactured threat can be a justifiable pretext for the most radical action.
Trump 1.0 already used the pretext of national security to slap tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, and his Trump 2.0 tariff wars and threats are no different. What happens when Canada responds in kind with reciprocal tariffs designed to hurt the US economically? Will it be long before Canada is accused of starting the tariff war? Does that quickly evolve into a pretext for more drastic US action to make Canada the 51st state? After all, it is just … self-defense.
All this sounds like phantasmagorical, political hyperventilating, and frankly paranoid. The rhetoric about the US taking over Canada the way Russia invaded Ukraine must be a joke, a trick to gain the upper hand in good old-fashioned trade negotiations. Right? Right?
Let’s hope.
But then, Trump has a Napoleonic view of his powers and the rule of law. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he posted on social media last weekend. If he does not see himself bound by US constitutional law, why would he feel bound by international law?
This US pivot toward Russia marks the most dangerous threat to the multilateral world’s adherence to the rule of law and the NATO alliance in general. It is not a bug of the Trump presidency; it is a feature. Everything has changed. “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then,” Alice says as she absorbs what has happened to her.
The Western world can’t go back either. There is malice in Wonderland now, and it is no longer just Russia; it’s the United States itself.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy gives a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 19, 2025.
Trump feuds with Zelensky, cozies up to Putin
The war of words between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hit a new nadir on Wednesday after Trump labeled Zelensky a “dictator” who “has done a terrible job.” Trump criticized Zelensky for imposing martial law and suspending elections, ignoring the fact that both actions were taken because of Russia’s invasion and ongoing war.
Reaction has been swift. Both British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz condemned Trump’s remarks and expressed support for Zelensky’s legitimacy. In contrast, Russia’s ambassador to the UK, Andrei Kelin, praised the Trump administration for having “an understanding of what (Russia) is doing, why we are doing it, and what should be the outcome of it … For the first time we have noticed that [the US] are not simply saying that this is Russian propaganda and disinformation.”
Why does MAGA support Moscow? Anti-Ukraine sentiment dates back to a false MAGA narrative that blamed Ukraine, not Russia, for interference in the 2016 election. Putin also finds favor with Trump supporters for being “completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism,” in the words of right-wing writer Rod Dreher.
What’s next for Ukraine? The US and Russia agreed in Riyadh to designate teams to negotiate the end of the war and to reestablish diplomatic channels. French President Emmanuel Macron and Starmer will meet with Trump in Washington, DC, next week, while Zelensky is meeting with Washington's Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, this Thursday. Time is of the essence: On Truth Social, Trump threatened that “Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”The McGill University campus.
HARD NUMBERS: Foreign no-shows in Canadian schools, Ontario makes a big call to doctors, Dastardly dye dies in US, Gringo companies send toxic waste south
100: Meanwhile, the government of Ontario is looking to have 100 foreign-trained doctors licensed to practice in high-need communities such as Sudbury, Goderich, and Huntsville. This comes after the province missed its initial target of 50 by the end of 2024. The program aims to address shortages in primary care physicians as older doctors retire and population growth continues.
3: This isn’t only a hard number, it’s a red number. Red 3, to be precise, is a food coloring that is being banned in the US, food safety regulators announced Wednesday. The bright red petroleum-based dye — used in candies, soft drinks, pills, baked goods, and, famously, maraschino cherries — has been found to cause cancer in lab animals. The move is a victory for consumer protection groups that have sought the dye’s death for decades. Food producers have two years to replace it in their products, and pharma companies get an extra year beyond that.
200,000: US companies sent some 200,000 tons of toxic waste to a single processing plant in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2022. Researchers recently found extremely high levels of neurotoxins in the soil surrounding the Zinc Nacional plant, which treats the dust generated from recycling metal junk — such as cars, electronics, and appliances — and turns it into fertilizers and other products. Lead contamination levels alone in homes near the plant were found to be more than 60 times higher than what the US considers safe.President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with House Republicans at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington, DC, on Nov. 13, 2024.
Opinion: A Trumpian storm is brewing
For months on the campaign trail and in a crescendo last week at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump has made promises to American voters. On foreign policy, this list includes everything from ending the war in Ukraine within six months of taking office and imposing “all hell” if the Israeli hostages are not released before Inauguration Day (with a ceasefire deal coming into view) to his more recent discussions about taking control of the Panama Canal.
In anticipation of Trump’s return, the world has been packing their go-bags and considering how best to prepare. The Trump administration the world has been preparing for, however, may not be the one it gets. It is becoming increasingly clear how distinctly different Trump’s current worldview is than what came before him – including what he envisioned during his first term.
Differing tactics
Unlike the administration of Joe Biden, which leaned heavily on consensus building, non-binding partnerships like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and negotiations ad infinitum, Trump’s tactics have always been different. The businessman-president trades in grievances. He looks for the points of disparity and deploys (largely economic) tools like tariffs and sanctions to bring his “adversaries” closer to his preferred position – and to advance what he sees as America’s best interests. During his first term, for instance, Trump walked back a threat to impose tariffs on Mexico’s goods only after its government agreed to a deal stemming the flow of migrants along the southwestern border.
From his post-election personnel decisions, policy proposals, and posts on Truth Social, it seems clear Trump will continue to deploy these tactics in his second term. But what is also emerging is a Trump foreign policy agenda that’s radically different from Trump 1.0. Then “America First” focused on immigration, bringing jobs and manufacturing home, with a significant focus on reorienting global supply chains. With the exception of the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Trump largely avoided telegraphed security operations.
An aspirational agenda
Now, Trump has seemingly set his sights on a much more ambitious set of priorities. In 2025, Trump is speaking of the dawn of “the golden age of America.” Making America Great Again looks less like an isolationist story and more like a no-stone-uncovered one. As Trump scans the horizon looking for the angles, he has put his neighborhood, Europe, and the world on notice that almost nowhere will go unconsidered.
To the North, Trump’s December announcement that he would impose 25% tariffs on Canada set off a chain reaction that ultimately led to an already-fragile Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation. Trump’s repeated barbs about Canada becoming the 51st US state and musings about removing the “artificial line” separating the two countries have continued to destabilize the political landscape. Canadian officials are reportedly drawing up their own list of American products to tariff should Trump make a move. To the South, Mexico has also been forced to respond to Trump's tariff and border vows. After he suggested renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, President Claudia Sheinbaum went tit-for-tat with Trump proposing to call the US, America Mexicana.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, headline-grabbing claims about acquiring Greenland initially generated chuckles in Europe. His threat to tariff Denmark at a very high level to open the door for negotiations over Greenland is Trump 1.0. His articulated vision of needing Greenland for national security purposes (and ultimately access to the Arctic’s resources) while refusing to rule out the use of military coercion are hallmarks of the emerging new Trump foreign policy.
In Trump 2.0, anywhere is up for grabs (a real estate deal), and economic tools of national security will be backed up by more traditional force posturing. The lesson of the moment appears to be that the best countries can hope for is to stay out of Trump’s crosshairs. America’s EU allies, for their part, have responded by taking Trump’s ideas increasingly seriously. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot issued reminders of the inviolability of European borders, but European capitals are rattled.
In his news conference last week, Trump speculated that “since we won the election the whole perception of the whole world is different.” It is not just the case that the US and its voters may see themselves differently since Trump’s reelection, but the world has somehow been changed by it.
Still, according to Trump, “big problems remain that need to be settled.” The president-elect has spent the post-election period throwing up dozens of foreign policy trial balloons to clarify how he would like to see these problems settled. As the clock winds down to his inauguration, Trump’s more grandiose foreign policy vision may soon move many targets into the eye of the storm.
Lindsay Newman is a geopolitical risk expert and columnist for GZERO.