Trump postpones the G-7 summit until or after September

US President Donald Trump has announced the postponement of the G-7 summit, which was to be held in the United States next month, indicating that he will expand the list of invited countries to include Australia, Russia, South Korea and India.

Trump tried during a press conference held on the American presidential plane on his return from Florida to Washington to justify his retreat from the date of the summit, saying in a statement quoted by Reuters that “the Group of Seven, which includes the largest economies of the world, has become a very old international gathering in its current form … and I postpone The summit to next September or beyond because I do not think this group does not adequately reflect what is going on in the world. ”

Trump hopes to win a second presidential term in the elections to be held on the third of November, and he desires for this that the summit becomes a symbol of the normalization of the situation he desires most with the stopping of economic activity, whose electoral costs could be very large.

The postponement is a retreat from Trump, who sought to host the group’s summit in Washington in an attempt to show that the United States, which has become a hotbed of the new Corona virus outbreak with more than 103,000 Americans dying of infection, has returned to normal.

It is not yet clear whether Trump‘s desire to expand the list of countries invited to the summit to include Russia, Australia, South Korea and India is an attempt to expand the group permanently.

It is noteworthy that Russia was excluded from what was known as the Group of Eight in 2014 under the pretext of re-annexing the Russian Crimea peninsula based on a popular referendum that came in favor of reuniting Russia with a large majority.

Source : Sana