FRANCE PERSPECTIVE

Paris hosts the summit as a clear-eyed host, aware that staging a G7 does not mean controlling it. France's presidency of the summit, held in Évian-les-Bains from June 15 to 17, unfolds under a spectacular 'security bubble': 16,000 police and gendarmes, nearly five hundred motorcyclists, sixty-four mobile gendarme and riot squadrons, helicopters, drone pilots, counterterrorism and cybercrime units, at a cost officially 'not yet assessed.' The setup, with its QR-code passes and 'blue' and 'red' zones, reprises the Paris 2024 Olympics model, now a 'security laboratory' for crowd management. But behind the logistics, the dominant angle is strategic resignation toward American unpredictability. 'You cannot manage Trump the way you did during his first term,' says Liana Fix of the Council on Foreign Relations, quoted in the press: every expected leader — France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Japan, the UK — has at some point faced the American president's trade fury or mockery, except for Japan's Sanae Takaichi, whom he likes. Neither his rising unpopularity nor the Supreme Court striking down his blanket tariffs is expected to soften him: 'America First' remains the frame. Europeans have learned to 'hope for the best while preparing for the worst.' Paris tends to symbolism — a June 17 dinner at Versailles for the 250th anniversary of American independence, chosen to evoke historic Franco-American friendship — while knowing the American president 'will impose his mood and his schedule.' French coverage does not forget the human cost of the operation: a motorcycle gendarme was killed and two others injured in a road accident in Haute-Savoie on the eve of the summit.