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      Trump to leave G7 summit early and return to Washington – as it happened

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      Donald Trump will leave the G7 summit early and return to Washington DC on Monday, the White House said about an hour after the president said people in Iran’s capital Tehran should evacuate immediately.Trump’s evacuation warning on Truth Social followed a warning from the Israeli defense forces issued a formal evacuation order to residents of Tehran warning them of the imminent bombing of “military infrastructure”.Trump was originally supposed to arrive back in the US in the early hours of Wednesday morning, according to people familiar with the matter.That’s it for today. My colleagues are continuing coverage of the developments in the Middle East here.Here’s what happened today:

      Donald Trump is leaving the G7 Summit early and return to Washington DC on Monday. “You probably see what I see and I have to be back as soon as I can,” Trump said in an apparent nod to the intensifying conflict in the Middle East.

      President Trump has directed national security staff to convene in the situation room, both CNN and Fox News are reporting.

      Trump says ‘everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran’ and that Iran “should have signed the ‘deal’”.

      The Republican-run Senate Finance Committee published a modified text of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that proposes Medicaid reforms and a new federal deduction for state and local taxes.

      Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba met with President Trump on the sidelines of the G7 meeting on Monday to discuss import auto tariffs Washington imposed on Japan, Reuters is reporting.

      European leaders at G7 trying to bring Iran back to negotiating table. But Iran is demanding a joint ceasefire with Israel, while Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is resisting the move, and Donald Trump praised the Israeli campaign, suggesting he did not yet believe it was time to relieve the pressure on Iran.

      Britain and the United States should finalize “very soon” the implementation of a trade deal agreed last month, Keir Starmer has said ahead of a meeting with Donald Trump in Canada.

      The US justice department has asked a federal appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit challenging race-conscious admissions at the US Naval Academy after the elite military school said it changed its policy under Donald Trump. The Naval Academy disclosed in March that it was no longer considering race or ethnicity in its admissions decisions following directives from Trump and defense secretary Pete Hegseth

      US House speaker Mike Johnson said he has postponed his planned 22 June trip to Israel to address its parliament, as an escalating battle between Israel and Iran has raised fears of a broader conflict.

      The American Bar Association has sued the Trump administration, seeking an order that would bar the White House from pursuing what the ABA called a campaign of intimidation against major law firms. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington DC, said the administration violated the US Constitution in a series of executive orders targeting law firms over their past clients and lawyers they hired.

      Minnesota shooting suspect had more than 45 names of elected officials, prosecutors say. Reuters reports that notebooks recovered from Boelter’s car, as well as the home where he had been staying, showed that he had meticulously planned the attacks for some time. He had the names and, in some cases, home addresses for more than 45 elected officials – “mostly or all Democrats” – according to an affidavit from an FBI agent.

      The suspect in the assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband this weekend drove to the homes of two other state politicians before he succeeded in killing one of the targets of his carefully planned attack, federal authorities said today.

      A federal judge has said she would issue a brief extension of an order temporarily blocking Donald Trump’s plan to bar foreign nationals from entering the US to study at Harvard University while she decides whether to issue a longer-term injunction.

      Trump once again complained about removing Russia from what was once the G8. Russia used to be a part of the exclusive club of major economies but was kicked out following its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

      Trump says Iran wants to talk about de-escalating hostilities with Israel, and he advises that they should do so immediately “before it’s too late”.

      Iran has been urgently signaling that it seeks an end to hostilities and resumption of talks over its nuclear programs, sending messages to Israel and the US via Arab intermediaries, the Wall Street Journal reports.

      The Trump Organization has launched a self-branded mobile service and a $499 smartphone, dubbed Trump Mobile, signaling a new effort to court conservative consumers with a wireless service positioned as an alternative to major telecom providers. The new mobile venture will include call centers based in the United States and phones made in America, the organization said.
      Trump aide Alex Pfeiffer said Israeli news reports that indicate US fighter jets are participating in airstrikes on Iran are not true.“This is not true,” Pfeiffer posted on X. “American forces are maintaining their defensive posture, and that has not changed. We will defend American interests.”“You probably see what I see and I have to be back as soon as I can,” Trump said in an apparent nod to the intensifying conflict in the Middle East, when asked why he’s cutting short his G7 trip and heading back to Washington tonight.President Trump has directed national security staff to convene in the situation room, both CNN and Fox News are reporting, citing a White House official. Trump will be leaving the G7 Summit in Canada early.There are few other details available.Donald Trump will leave the G7 summit early and return to Washington DC on Monday, the White House said about an hour after the president said people in Iran’s capital Tehran should evacuate immediately.Trump’s evacuation warning on Truth Social followed a warning from the Israeli defense forces issued a formal evacuation order to residents of Tehran warning them of the imminent bombing of “military infrastructure”.Trump was originally supposed to arrive back in the US in the early hours of Wednesday morning, according to people familiar with the matter.The scientist responsible for overseeing the CDC team that collects data on COVID-19 and RSV hospitalizations resigned on Monday.Dr. Fiona Havers told colleagues in an email that she no longer had confidence the data would be used “objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions,” according to Reuters.She resigned before a planned meeting of a new vaccine panel put in place by Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. after he fired all 17 members of the CDC’s independent vaccine advisory panel. Kennedy also dropped a recommendation to get the Covid shot for healthy children and pregnant women.A Health and Human Services spokesperson told Reuters that the agency is committed to “gold standard science.”Trump says everyone should evacuate Tehran and that Iran “should have signed the ‘deal’”.“I told them to sign,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “What a shame, and waste of human life. IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he thinks he and Trump will be able to wrap up a new economic and security deal between the US and Canada within 30 days. His office did not say whether that means he had accepted Trump’s earlier emphasis on tariffs.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he ordered the deployment of additional defensive capabilities to the Middle East over the weekend “to enhance our defensive posture in the region,” according to a statement he posted on X on Monday. He did not disclose what military capabilities he sent to the region.“Protecting U.S. forces is our top priority and these deployments are intended to enhance our defensive posture in the region,” Hegseth posted.The Republican-run Senate Finance Committee published a modified text of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that proposes Medicaid reforms and a new federal deduction for state and local taxes.The proposed changes will now be debated by Senate Republicans.Among the proposed changes are:

      An end to the $7,500 tax credit on new electric vehicles 180 days after the law is enacted. And an end to the $4,000 used-vehicle EV tax credit 90 days after the law is passed.

      A full phase-out of solar and wind energy tax credits by 2028, but an extension of the incentive for Trump administration-favored hydropower, nuclear and geothermal energy to 2036.
      Minnesota senator Ann Rest says she is “so grateful” for the work of law enforcement after learning that the shooting suspect, Vance Boelter, was allegedly parked outside her home before going to former Rep. Melissa Hortman’s home.“I have been made aware that the shooting suspect was parked near my home early Saturday morning,” Rest said in a statement. “I am so grateful for the heroic work of the New Hope Police Department and its officers. Their quick action saved my life.I am also thankful for the work of state and local law enforcement to apprehend the suspect before he could take any more lives.While I am thankful the suspect has been apprehended, I grieve for the loss of Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and I am praying for the recovery of John and Yvette Hoffman.”At the G7 summit, Trump said a new economic deal with Canada was possible but that he wanted tariffs to be a part of it, according to Reuters.“I have a tariff concept. [Canadian Prime Minister] Mark [Carney] has a different concept … we’re going to see if we can get to the bottom of it,” Trump said when meeting Carney on the sidelines of a G7 summit in Alberta. “I’m a tariff person.”Canada is the top supplier of steel and aluminum to the United States and currently faces tariffs imposed by Trump on both metals as well as on auto exports.“We are in the middle of a discussion – we are not at the end of the discussion. Our position is that we should have no tariffs on Canadian exports to the United States,” Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to Washington, told reporters after Carney met Trump.“We will continue to talk until we find a deal that is the best deal we can achieve for Canada,” Hillman said.Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba met with President Trump on the sidelines of the G7 meeting on Monday to discuss import auto tariffs Washington imposed on Japan, Reuters is reporting.Tokyo is urging Washington to drop the tariffs because they threaten to slow Japan’s economy, the Japanese government said.Ishiba wants Trump to end the 25% auto tariff he imposed on Japanese cars and a 24% reciprocal tariff paused until July 9. More

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      Trump vetoed Israeli plan to kill Iran’s supreme leader – report

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      President Donald Trump vetoed an Israeli plan in recent days to kill Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, two US officials told Reuters on Sunday.“Have the Iranians killed an American yet? No. Until they do we’re not even talking about going after the political leadership,” said one of the sources, a senior US administration official.The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said top US officials have been in constant communications with Israeli officials in the days since Israel launched a massive attack on Iran in a bid to halt its nuclear program.They said the Israelis reported that they had an opportunity to kill the top Iranian leader, but Trump waved them off of the plan.The officials would not say whether Trump himself delivered the message. But Trump has been in frequent communications with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.When asked about Reuters report, Netanyahu, in an interview on Sunday with Fox News Channel’s Special Report With Bret Baier, said: “There’s so many false reports of conversations that never happened, and I’m not going to get into that.”“But I can tell you, I think that we do what we need to do, we’ll do what we need to do. And I think the United States knows what is good for the United States,” Netanyahu said.Trump has been holding out hope for a resumption of US-Iranian negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program. Talks that had been scheduled for Sunday in Oman were canceled as a result of the strikes.Trump told Reuters on Friday that “we knew everything” about the Israeli strikes. More

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      The Guardian view on Israel’s shock attack on Iran: confusing US signals add to the peril | Editorial

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      US presidents who thought they could easily restrain Benjamin Netanyahu have quickly learned their lesson. “Who’s the fucking superpower?” Bill Clinton reportedly exploded after his first meeting with the Israeli prime minister.Did Donald Trump make the same mistake? The state department quickly declared that the devastating overnight Israeli attack on Iran – which killed key military commanders and nuclear scientists as well as striking its missile capacity and a nuclear enrichment site – was unilateral. Mr Trump had reportedly urged Mr Netanyahu to hold off in a call on Monday, pending US talks with Iran over its nuclear programme due this weekend. The suspicion is that Israel feared that a deal might be reached and wanted to strike first. But Israeli officials have briefed that they had a secret green light from the US, with Mr Trump only claiming to oppose it.Iran, reeling from the attack but afraid of looking too weak to retaliate, is unlikely to believe that the US did not acquiesce to the offensive, if unenthusiastically. It might suit it better to pretend otherwise – in the short term, it is not clear what ability it has to hit back at Israel, never mind taking on the US. But Mr Trump has made that hard by threatening “even more brutal attacks” ahead, urging Iran to “make a deal, before there’s nothing left” and claiming that “we knew everything”. Whether Israel really convinced Mr Trump that this was the way to cut a deal, or he is offering a post-hoc justification after being outflanked by Mr Netanyahu, may no longer matter.Israel has become increasingly and dangerously confident of its ability to reshape the Middle East without pushing it over the brink. It believes that its previous pummellings of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s air defences have created a brief opportunity to destroy the existential threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme before it is too late. Russia is not about to ride to Tehran’s rescue, and while Gulf states don’t want instability, they are not distraught to see an old rival weakened.But not least in the reckoning is surely that Mr Netanyahu, who survives politically through military action, only narrowly survived a Knesset vote this week. The government also faces mounting international condemnation over its war crimes in Gaza – though the US and others allow those crimes to continue. It is destroying the nation’s international reputation, yet may bolster domestic support through this campaign.The obvious question is the future of a key Iranian enrichment site deep underground at Fordo, which many believe Israel could not destroy without US “bunker busters”. If Israel believes that taking out personnel and some infrastructure is sufficient to preclude Iran’s nuclear threat, that is a huge and perilous gamble. This attack may well trigger a rush to full nuclear-armed status by Tehran – and ultimately others – and risks spurring more desperate measures in the meantime. Surely more likely is that Israel hopes to draw in Washington, by persuading it that Iran is a paper tiger or baiting Tehran into attacking US targets.“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Mr Trump claimed in his inaugural speech. Yet on Friday he said was not concerned about a regional war breaking out due to Israel’s strikes. Few will feel so sanguine. The current incoherence and incomprehensibility of US foreign policy fuels instability and risks drawing adversaries towards fateful miscalculations.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      US ambassador to Israel says US no longer pursuing goal of independent Palestinian state

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      Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has said that the US is no longer pursuing the goal of an independent Palestinian state, marking what analysts describe as the most explicit abandonment yet of a cornerstone of US Middle East diplomacy.Asked during an interview with Bloomberg News if a Palestinian state remains a goal of US policy, he replied: “I don’t think so.”The former Arkansas governor chosen by Donald Trump as his envoy to Israel went further by suggesting that any future Palestinian entity could be carved out of “a Muslim country” rather than requiring Israel to cede territory.“Unless there are some significant things that happen that change the culture, there’s no room for it,” Huckabee was quoted as saying. Those probably won’t happen “in our lifetime”, he told the news agency.When pressed on Palestinian aspirations in the West Bank, where 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, Huckabee employed Israeli government terminology, asking: “Does it have to be in Judea and Samaria?”Trump, in his first term, was relatively tepid in his approach to a two-state solution, a longtime pillar of US Middle East policy, and he has given little sign of where he stands on the issue in his second term.The state department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Middle East analysts said the comments made explicit a shift that has been broadly expected.“This is not at all surprising given what we’ve seen in the last four-plus months, including the administration’s open support for expelling the population of Gaza, the legitimization of Israeli settlement and annexation policies,” said Khaled Elgindy, a scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and former adviser to Palestinian negotiators.“This is an administration that is committed to Palestinian erasure, both physical and political,” Elgindy said. “The signs were there even in the first Trump term, which nominally supported a Palestinian ‘state’ that was shorn of all sovereignty and under permanent Israeli control. At least now they’ve abandoned the pretense.”Yousef Munayyer, head of Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington DC, said Huckabee was merely articulating what US policy has long demonstrated in practice. “Mike Huckabee is saying out loud what US actions have been saying for decades and across different administrations,” he said. “Whatever commitments have been made in statements about a Palestinian state over time, US policy has never matched those stated commitments and only undercut them.”The ambassador’s position has deep roots in his evangelical Christian beliefs and longstanding support for Israeli settlement expansion. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Huckabee said: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian.” In a 2017 visit to the occupied West Bank, he rejected the concept of Israeli occupation entirely.“I think Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria,” said Huckabee at the time. “There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”What distinguishes Huckabee, Munayyer argued, has been his willingness to be explicit about objectives that previous officials had kept veiled. “What makes Huckabee unique is that he is shameless enough to admit out loud the goal of erasing the Palestinian people.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe analysts add that Huckabee’s explicit rejection of Palestinian statehood, which comes as the war in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and displaced most of the territory’s more than 2 million residents, would also create diplomatic complications for US allies.“This will put European and Arab states in a bind, since they are still strongly committed to two states but have always deferred to Washington,” Elgindy said.Hours after Huckabee’s comments were reported, the US imposed sanctions on a leading Palestinian human rights organization, Addameer, as well as five charity groups in the Middle East and Europe, claiming that they support Palestinian militants.The US treasury department alleged that Addameer, which provides legal services to Palestinians detained by Israel or the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, “has long supported and is affiliated” with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a militant group classified as a terrorist organization by the US and EU.Israel raided the West Bank offices of Addameer and other groups in 2022 over their alleged PFLP links. The United Nations condemned that raid at the time, saying that Israeli authorities had not presented to the UN any credible evidence to justify their declarations.The Guardian later reported that a classified CIA report showed the agency had been unable to find any evidence to support Israel’s description of the group as a “terrorist organization”. More

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      Iran blasts Trump for ‘racist mentality’ and hostility to Muslims over travel ban

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      Tehran has denounced the US travel ban on Iranians and citizens of 11 other mostly Middle Eastern and African countries, saying Washington’s decision was a sign of a “racist mentality”.Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday reviving sweeping restrictions that echo the US president’s first-term travel ban, justified on national security grounds after a firebomb attack at a pro-Israel rally in Colorado.Alireza Hashemi-Raja, the foreign ministry’s director general for the affairs of Iranians abroad, called the measure – which takes effect on 9 June – “a clear sign of the dominance of a supremacist and racist mentality among American policymakers”.The decision “indicates the deep hostility of American decision-makers towards the Iranian and Muslim people”, he added in a statement the ministry released on Saturday.Apart from Iran, the US ban targets nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. A partial ban was imposed on travellers from seven other countries.Hashemi-Raja said the policy “violates fundamental principles of international law” and deprives “hundreds of millions of people of the right to travel based solely on their nationality or religion”.The foreign ministry official said the ban was discriminatory and would “entail international responsibility for the US government”, without elaborating.Iran and the US severed diplomatic ties shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and relations have remained deeply strained since.The US is home to the largest Iranian community outside Iran. According to figures from Tehran’s foreign ministry, in 2020 there were about 1.5 million Iranians in the US.Trump’s executive order came days after Sunday’s attack at the Colorado rally, in which authorities said more than a dozen people were hurt. The suspect is an Egyptian man who had overstayed a tourist visa. More

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      BBC accuses White House of misrepresenting fatal Gaza attack report

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      The BBC has defended its reporting on the war in Gaza and accused the White House of misrepresenting its journalism after Donald Trump’s administration criticised its coverage of a fatal attack near a US-backed aid distribution site.Senior BBC journalists said the White House was political point-scoring after Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, accused the corporation of taking “the word of Hamas with total truth”. She also falsely claimed that the BBC had removed a story about the incident.Leavitt launched her attack on the BBC after being asked about reports that Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution centre in Rafah. Brandishing a print-out of images taken from the BBC’s website, she accused the corporation of having to “correct and take down” its story about the fatalities and injuries involved in the attack.The Hamas-run health ministry had said at least 31 people were killed in the gunfire. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) later said at least 21 Palestinians were killed by IDF troops.In a briefing on Tuesday, Leavitt said: “The administration is aware of those reports and we are currently looking into the veracity of them because, unfortunately, unlike some in the media, we don’t take the word of Hamas with total truth. We like to look into it when they speak, unlike the BBC.“And then, oh, wait, they had to correct and take down their entire story, saying: ‘We reviewed the footage and couldn’t find any evidence of anything.’”The BBC swiftly issued a robust statement. It said that casualty numbers were updated throughout the day from multiple sources, as is the case of any incident of the kind in a chaotic war zone. It also clarified that the accusation from Leavitt that the BBC had removed a story was false.“The claim the BBC took down a story after reviewing footage is completely wrong,” it said. “We did not remove any story and we stand by our journalism.View image in fullscreen“Our news stories and headlines about Sunday’s aid distribution centre incident were updated throughout the day with the latest fatality figures as they came in from various sources … This is totally normal practice on any fast-moving news story.”It said the White House had conflated that incident with a “completely separate” report by BBC Verify, the corporation’s factchecking team, which found a viral video posted on social media was not linked to the aid distribution centre it claimed to show. “This video did not run on BBC news channels and had not informed our reporting,” it said. “Conflating these two stories is simply misleading.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe BBC called on the White House to join forces with its calls for “immediate access” to Gaza. International journalists are prevented from entering by Israel.Jonathan Munro, the deputy director of the BBC News, said the claims were wrong, adding: “It’s important that accurate journalism is respected, and that governments call for free access to Gaza.”Jeremy Bowen, the corporation’s international editor, accused the White House of launching a political attack. “To be quite frank, the Trump administration does not have a good record when it comes to telling the truth itself,” he said. “She’s making a political point, basically.“Israel doesn’t let us in because it’s doing things there, clearly I think, that they don’t want us to see otherwise they would allow free reporting.“I’ve reported on wars for the best part of 40 years. I’ve reported on more than 20 wars. And I’m telling you, even when you get full access, it is really difficult to report them. When you can’t get in, it’s even harder.” More

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      US distances itself from Gaza food delivery group amid questions over its leadership, funding

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      After a rollout trumpeted by US officials, the US- and Israeli-backed effort that claimed it would return large-scale food deliveries to Gaza was born an orphan, with questions growing over its leadership, sources of funding and ties to Israeli officials and private US security contractors.The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had said it would securely provide food supplies to the Gaza Strip, ending an Israeli blockade that UN officials say have led to the brink of a famine.Instead, early reports and leaked video of its operations that began this week have depicted a scene of chaos, with crowds storming a distribution site and Israeli military officials confirming they had fired “warning shots” to restore order. Gaza health officials said at least one civilian had been killed and 48 injured in the incident.In a statement, GHF downplayed the episode, claimed there had been no casualties, and said it had distributed 14,550 food boxes, or 840,262 meals, according to its own calculations.But GHF had no experience distributing food in a famine zone, and as of Wednesday, its leadership remained opaque, if not deliberately obscure. A number of executives and board members have refuted links to the group or stepped down, including Jake Wood, the ex-Marine who previously headed the group. When he resigned on Sunday, he said that it “is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon”. The group named John Acree, a former senior official at USAID, as its interim executive director.Both a Geneva-based company and a Delaware-based company tied to the organisation are reportedly being dissolved, a GHF spokesperson told an investigative Israeli media outlet, increasing speculation over its initiators and sources of funding. The New York Times has reported that the idea for the group came from “Israeli officials in the earliest weeks of the war” as a way to undermine Hamas.And the US state department has also distanced itself from GHF’s operations, with a spokesperson saying she could not speak to the group’s chaotic rollout or what plans could be made to extend aid to hundreds of thousands more people in Gaza who would not receive aid.“This is not a state department effort. We don’t have a plan,” Tammy Bruce, the state department spokesperson, said during a briefing on Tuesday when asked about plans to extend aid deliveries to those in the north of the Gaza Strip. “I’m not going to speculate or to say what they should or should not do.”She added that any questions about the group’s work should be addressed solely to the group.“The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has an email,” Bruce said. “You can – they should be reached out to, and that’s what I’d recommend regarding plans to expand, plans to make assessments of what’s worked and what hasn’t at this point and what changes they might make. And what the goal is – clearly the goal is to reach as many people as possible.”But when contacted by the Guardian, the group said it couldn’t provide a representative for an interview and did not immediately respond to inquiries about its current leadership, where it was registered or its links to US security contractors.The group did defend its food distribution, denying Palestinian crowds had been fired upon or that anyone had been injured at its distribution sites.A statement sent to the Guardian from GHF said that under its protocol “for a brief moment the GHF team intentionally relaxed its security protocols to safeguard against crowd reactions to finally receiving food”.The group in part blamed the “pressure” on the distribution site due to “acute hunger and Hamas-imposed blockades, which create dangerous conditions outside the gates”.The statement did not address Israel’s role in preventing deliveries of aid.“Unfortunately, there are many parties who wish to see GHF fail,” the group said.The UN and other humanitarian organisations have refused to work with GHF, arguing that doing so would compromise efforts to reach civilians in all conflict zones, and put at risk both their teams and local people.“Yesterday, we saw tens of thousands of desperate people under fire, storming a militarized distribution point established on the rubble of their homes,” said Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.Others have described the effort as an attempt to use deliveries of aid as a political weapon.Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, said that the bloc opposed the “privatisation of the distribution of humanitarian aid. Humanitarian aid cannot be weaponized.” More

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      Trump’s foreign policy is not so unusual for the US – he just drops the facade of moral leadership

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      JD Vance is an Iraq war veteran and the US vice-president. On Friday, he declared the doctrine that underpinned Washington’s approach to international relations for a generation is now dead.“We had a long experiment in our foreign policy that traded national defence and the maintenance of our alliances for nation building and meddling in foreign countries’ affairs, even when those foreign countries had very little to do with core American interests,” Vance told Naval Academy graduates in Annapolis, Maryland.His boss Donald Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East signified an end to all that, Vance said: “What we’re seeing from President Trump is a generational shift in policy with profound implications for the job that each and every one of you will be asked to do.”US foreign policy has previously zigged and zagged from isolation to imperialism. Woodrow Wilson entered the first world war with the the goal of “making the world safe for democracy”. Washington retreated from the world again during the 1920s and 1930s only to fight the second world war and emerge as a military and economic superpower.Foreign policy during the cold war centered on countering the Soviet Union through alliances, military interventions and proxy wars. The 11 September 2001 attacks shifted focus to counterterrorism, leading to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under George W Bush with justifications that included spreading democracy.Barack Obama emphasized diplomacy and reducing troop commitments, though drone strikes and counterterrorism operations persisted. Trump’s first term pushed economic nationalism, pressuring allies to pay their way. Joe Biden restored multilateralism, focusing on climate, alliances and countering China’s influence.As in many other political arenas, Trump’s second term is bolder and louder on the world stage.Trump and Vance have sought to portray the “America first” policy as a clean break from the recent past. Human rights, democracy, foreign aid and military intervention are out. Economic deals, regional stability and pragmatic self-interest are in.But former government officials interviewed by the Guardian paint a more nuanced picture, suggesting that Trump’s quid pro quo approach has more in common with his predecessors than it first appears. Where he does differ, they argue, is in his shameless abandonment of moral leadership and use of the US presidency for personal gain.On a recent four-day swing through Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Trump was feted by autocratic rulers with a trio of lavish state visits where there was heavy emphasis on economic and security partnerships.Saudi Arabia pledged $600bn in investments in the US across industries such as energy, defence, technology and infrastructure, although how much of that will actually be new investment – or come to fruition – remains to be seen. A $142bn defence cooperation agreement was described by the White House as the biggest in US history.Qatar and the US inked agreements worth $1.2tn, including a $96bn purchase of Boeing jets. The UAE secured more than $200bn in commercial agreements and a deal to establish the biggest artificial intelligence campus outside the US.Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic magazine, said Trump had shown “the outlines of America’s newest foreign policy doctrine: extreme transactionalism”. He had prioritized quick deals over long-term stability, ideological principles or established alliances. But, Goldberg noted, the president had also advanced the cause of his family’s businesses.The president said he will accept a $400m luxury plane from Qatar and use it as Air Force One. Abu Dhabi is using a Trump family-aligned stablecoin for a $2bn investment in the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. And the Trump Organization, run by the president’s two oldest sons, is developing major property projects including a high-rise tower in Jeddah, a luxury hotel in Dubai, and a golf course and villa complex in Qatar.Analysts say no US president has received overseas gifts on such a scale. Aaron David Miller, who served for two decades as a state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues for both Democratic and Republican administrations, said: “He gives transactionalism a bad name.“The level of self-dealing in this administration means the notion that the national interest is now seamlessly blended with Donald Trump’s personal interests and financial interests. The concept of an American national interest that transcends party politics and partisanship has gone the way of the dodo.”Ned Price, a former US state department spokesperson during the Biden administration, said: “I actually think calling this ‘transactional’ is far too charitable, because so much of this is predicated not on the national interest but on the president’s own personal interest, including his economic interests and the economic interests of his family and those around him.”Presidential trips to the Middle East usually feature at least some public calls for authoritarian governments to improve their human rights efforts. But not from Trump as he toured the marble and gilded palaces of Gulf rulers and deemed them “perfecto” and “very hard to buy” while barely mentioning the war in Gaza.In his remarks at a VIP business conference in Riyadh, the president went out of his way to distance himself from the actions of past administrations, the days when he said US officials would fly in “in beautiful planes, giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs”.Trump said: “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Price challenges the notion that Trump’s aversion to interventionism represents revolution rather than evolution. “It is fair to say that presidents have successively been moving in that direction,” he said.“The sort of military adventurism that characterised the George W Bush presidency is not something that President Obama had an appetite for. It’s not something that President Biden had an appetite for. President Obama’s version of ‘Don’t do stupid shit’ has echoes of what President Trump said. Of course, as he often does, President Trump took it one step further.”Price added: “Most people who worked under President Biden or President Obama would tell you it doesn’t have to be either/or: you don’t have to be a nation builder or an isolationist. You can engage on the basis of interest and values at the same time and it’s about calibrating the mix rather than declaring the age of nation building is entirely over and from now on we’re not going to lecture, we’re just going to come in and be feted with your goods.”In his address in Riyadh, Trump made no reference to the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul which, the CIA found, had been sanctioned by the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The president’s willingness to turn a blind eye to human rights violations was condemned by Democrats.Ro Khanna, who serves on the House of Representatives’ armed services committee, said: “I was opposed to the Iraq war and I’m opposed to this idea that we can just go in and build nations. But I’m not opposed to the idea of human rights and international law.“To see an American president basically embrace cultural relativism was a rejection of any notion that American values about freedom and rule of law are not just our cultural constructs but are universal values.”Khanna added: “The past century of development in global governance structures has pointed us towards human rights and dignity. He wants to go back to a a world where we just have nation-states and that was the world that had wars and colonialism and conflict.”Trump is hardly the first president to court oil-rich nations in the Middle East and tread lightly on human rights issues. Nor is he the first to be accused of putting interests before values. The public was deceived to justify wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Democratically elected leaders have been ousted and brutal dictators propped up when it suited US policy goals.John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said: “Different presidencies say they have different priorities but I would be willing to go down the list and all of their record is mixed and somewhat hypocritical in terms of exactly what they do on the values side of things. Just take Biden as the most recent example. He started off by calling Saudi Arabia a pariah but by the end of it he was going to visit the crown prince as well.”In that sense, Trump’s lack of pretension to an ethical foreign policy might strike some as refreshingly honest. His supporters have long praised him for “telling it like it is” and refusing to indulge the moral platitudes of career politicians.Miller, the former state department official who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank in Washington, said: “He’s made explicit what is implicit in Republican and Democratic administrations. I’m not saying presidents don’t care about values; Joe Biden cared a lot about American values. But the reality is, when it comes time to make choices, where or what do we choose?”Miller added: “No administration I ever worked for made human rights or the promotion of democracy the centerpiece of our foreign policy. There are any number of reasons for that. But Donald Trump, it seems to me, is not even pretending there are values. He’s emptied the ethical and moral frame of American foreign policy.”Trump’s lifelong aversion to war is seen by many as a positive, including by some on the left. But it comes with an apparent desire to achieve significant and flashy diplomatic breakthroughs that might win him the Nobel peace prize. The president also displays an obvious comfort and preference for dealing with strongmen who flatter him, often siding with Russia’s Vladimir Putin against Ukraine.Miller commented: “Trump has no clear conception of the national interest. It’s subordinated to his grievances, his pet projects – tariffs – his political interests, his vanity, his financial interests. I worked for half a dozen secretaries of state of both political parties. That he is so far out of the norm with respect to foreign policy frankly is less of a concern to me than what’s happening here at home.” More