GENEVA — President Donald Trump will touch down in France on Monday for a summit with allies who are at odds with him over a pair of wars: one they don’t believe he should have started, and another they want him to do more to stop.
Trump will spend two days at the Group of Seven meeting of leading industrialized nations in the resort town of Evian-les-Bains, in which both the Iran war and the Russia-Ukraine conflict figure to loom large.
After launching an attack against Iran on Feb. 28, Trump has complained that European allies haven’t done enough to advance the American war aims.
Mocking British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said in the spring: “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”
For their part, European leaders have objected that Trump didn’t bother to consult them beforehand about a war they argue was avoidable.
French President Emmanuel Macron, the summit host, has described Trump’s military assault on Iran as “outside the framework of international law.”
Amid these tensions, Trump and other G7 participants are scheduled to meet with Middle East leaders as he works toward a final peace deal with Iran.
On Tuesday, Trump and his counterparts will sit down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to discuss ways to end that war on fair terms.
Trump famously told Zelenskyy in a contentious Oval Office meeting last year that he “doesn’t have the cards,” pressing him to agree to a ceasefire. Since then, Zelenskyy’s military has gained traction against Russia through its use of a sophisticated drone arsenal that has confounded Russian forces.
Whatever cards Zelenskyy held in 2025, he holds better ones now, analysts, European leaders and some Republican lawmakers say. Ukraine’s resilience gives Trump more leverage in telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he needs to withdraw troops and end the fighting, they said. The question is whether Trump will use it.
“The Russians seem to be on their back foot,” said William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who is now with the Atlantic Council think tank.
Asked what Trump might say at the G7 meeting, one of his confidants, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told NBC News: “He’s going to vent about their lack of support in Iran. And I’m hoping he’ll reset and re-engage in Ukraine-Russia. I hope he will understand that Ukraine is more than holding their own and now is the time put pressure on Putin to get this thing over with.”
A wildcard in any summit meeting is Trump’s mood. He’ll fly to Evian straight from the Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match that he staged on the White House grounds, an event that he had excitedly anticipated.
Trump said Sunday he reached a breakthrough in the Iran war, posting on his social media site that a “deal” with Iran was done and the crucial Strait of Hormuz shipping lane would reopen without Iran charging a toll for passage. That was the status quo before the war. The deal’s success will hinge on whether Iran ultimately develops a nuclear weapon.
However buoyed he might feel coming into the summit, the company of Western leaders has at times turned Trump sour. At a G7 meeting in 2018, during his first term, he refused to sign the joint statement and disparaged the host, then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as “very dishonest and weak.”
The following year he questioned whether the G7 was worth it, according to a CNN report.
This time, Macron is working to stave off any discord.
France postponed the summit a day so that Trump wouldn’t have to miss the UFC fight, which coincided with his 80th birthday.
At Macron’s invitation, when the summit ends Trump will meet with the French leader at the Palace of Versailles for a private dinner.
“President Macron extended this private invitation for him to go to Versailles for this extravagant dinner, knowing that you know President Trump is one to enjoy the pomp and circumstance for an invitation that doesn’t sound like it’s been extended” to other world leaders, said Ned Price, a former State Department spokesman in Joe Biden’s administration.
Still, Trump’s actions over the past year have given rise to mutual suspicion that doesn’t vanish overnight. Trump began his second term with ambitions of making Canada, a G7 member, the 51st state. He alarmed much of Europe with his threat to take over Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark.
The wars amount to another flashpoint. On either side of the Atlantic, leaders want something they contend the other isn’t delivering.
European democracies, wary of an emboldened Russia, are united in blaming Putin for the war. They want him defeated and Ukraine’s sovereignty preserved. Ahead of the summit, a Macron aide told reporters that France wants the members to agree on the need to sustain support for Ukraine. What’s more, France doesn’t want Ukraine to cede territory to Russia, the aide said.
Yet, Trump has taken a more agnostic posture, faulting Zelenskyy at times for not being amenable to a compromise that would swiftly end the fighting. Trump’s mantra is the war needs to end — quickly. What worries European leaders is that he’s so eager for a peace deal that he’d let Russia acquire territory that it doesn’t control and that rightfully belongs to Ukraine.
“We need the war to end. We’re happy to have that happen, however possible,” a senior Trump administration official told reporters in a briefing last week.
As for Trump, Europe’s reluctance to join the attack on Iran reinforces his conviction that when the U.S. needs allies, they won’t be there to help.
“The paradox is the U.S. is telling us in Europe that we need to do more in Iran,” said a European Union official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “And there are a lot of Europeans who’ve said the U.S. has left us alone with Ukraine. It goes both ways.”
On the eve of the summit, Putin and Zelenskyy separately phoned Trump to congratulate him on his milestone birthday. Both mentioned the war, making arguments that might stick with Trump as he sits down with fellow leaders on the shores of Lake Geneva to map strategy.
Zelenskyy said in a statement that he discussed battlefield dynamics and “how our position has strengthened.”
Putin made sure to praise a president known to have a high threshold for flattery.
“The Russian president did not hide his respect for Donald Trump’s fighting qualities, his ability to take a hit, successfully overcome obstacles, and persistently achieve his goals,” a Russian read-out of the nearly hourlong call said.
CORRECTION (June 15, 2026, 8:40 a.m. ET): Due to an editing error, a previous version of this article misstated which country’s leader Trudeau was. He was the prime minister of Canada, not France.
