Well, that was unexpected! Trump left the G7 early....

Hundreds of people on social media predicted all weekend that Trump would leave the G7 in Canada early because he is:

1. mad that his parade was a bust
2. bored with Canada
3. outclassed by Carney
4. hurting in his fee-fees because all the other leaders laughed at him 

5. all of the above
So why now is anyone surprised that he left the G7 early?
The story was that he had to get back to Washington lickety split because he's arranging the end to the Iran-Israel War.
Yeah, sure. If there is one thing you can count on, its that the Trump White House was lying.
Or, actually, two things - that the Trump White House always lies and that Trump can't get either Netanyahu or the Ayatollah to do anything they don't want to do.
And I fully expect that Trump will be on one of his golf courses by Wednesday at the latest. He had to miss playing this weekend because of his miserable parade -- he was visibly disappointed in the poor turnout, particularly compared to the millions at the No Kings protests around the country.

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Trump had a temper tantrum where he blamed the weather forecasters for the turnout, then declared war on US cities:

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At the G7, it was pretty obvious that he was outclassed by the other leaders in Kananaskis:

VIDEO: A Disheveled/Sickly Looking Trump Started The G7 Summit With Epic Incoherent Rant Before Carney Stepped In to Save Trump From Himself open.substack.com/pub/deanblun...

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— Ray Beckerman (@raybeckerman.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 11:43 AM

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Trump, being the child he is, left the G7 early to return home. He says that it is because of the Iran-Israel conflict that he refused to sign a statement condemning the war. He left because PM Carney put him in his place today, cutting off his presser when he was about to have a… pic.twitter.com/PSblYlVlP2

— Rod (Izzy) Ⓜ️Ⓜ️ 🇺🇸🦅 (@1zzyzyx1) June 17, 2025

Trump chickens out when faced with a room full of all the enemy-allies he has made for himself, and his inability to intimidate Carney. No one believes this is about rushing back to pay attention to the Middle East. #cdnpoli #uspoli

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— Stephen Lautens (@stephenlautens.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 8:09 PM

We all know the real reason Trump left.

He's lazy as fuck.

There was no way he was going to work solid for 3 days.

It was never happening.

— Mike Gerald Gibbs🏳️‍🌈🍁 🇺🇦 (He/Him) (@Mikeggibbs) June 17, 2025

So, takeaway: Despite fears he would refuse to co-sign, Trump signed on to the statement — which pointedly calls for a de-escalation of hostilities in Iran and Gaza.

— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) June 16, 2025 at 9:20 PM

A senior Canadian official says it was Carney who convinced Trump to sign the statement. American officials had been spinning all day that they wouldn't sign.

— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) June 16, 2025 at 9:26 PM

The other takeaway is that Trump now is feuding with Macron.
First, Macron dropped into Greenland on his way to Canada - sending Trump the message that France isn't going to allow America tp walk over Greenland without consequences:

Macron heads to Greenland in show of European solidarity

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— EUwatch 🇪🇺 (@euwatch.live) June 15, 2025 at 5:43 AM

And Macron was chuckling with Meloni as they were sitting across from Trump:

Emmanuel Macron of France and Giorgia Meloni of Italy having a chat. They 1000% hate him. It’s the eye roll for me 💀

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— Still We Rise (@lindsaymeyerharley.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 2:49 PM

So Trump said this about Macron when he was on the way home:

Trump taking shots at Macron as he leaves the G7 summit. (Shortly before midnight here.) I'm told that Trump told the other G7 leaders that he was looking to set up direct talks with Tehran. But Trump now insisting it's not a ceasefire. ....weird?

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— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) June 16, 2025 at 11:24 PM

But it is ominous that Israel is trying to drag the US into its war of choice:

Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant says he believes the United States has an “obligation” to assist Israel’s operation inside Iran.

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— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 11:38 PM

And maybe they have succeeded:

The President of the United States just yelled over social media for “everyone” to “immediately evacuate Tehran.” Think about that for a moment. It will set off mass panic in the city. It forecasts prior knowledge of an attack. It makes America a target of Iranian terrorists. pic.twitter.com/OeQvEuuuIz

— John Jackson (@hissgoescobra) June 16, 2025

🚨 BREAKING: Israeli Channel 14 reports that Trump is expected to sign an order within hours to formally enter the Israel–Iran war.

Reports also suggest the U.S. may have already begun strikes on Tehran.

Aircraft carriers. Jets. Troop movement.
This isn’t posturing anymore,… pic.twitter.com/sPDOFeGXmC

— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) June 17, 2025

Wesley Wark tonight has a great column about the intelligence in the Iran-Israel War - well worth reading: 

Wesley Wark’s National Security and Intelligence Newsletter

The "hardest decision" for pre-emptive war
Or, what is the intelligence?
Israel’s decision to launch pre-emptive strikes against Iran, targeting its nuclear capabilities, missile sites, military leadership and nuclear scientists, rested on two kinds of intelligence.
One was an ability, presumably led by Mossad, to achieve remarkably high levels of intelligence on its targets, on Iran’s air defence capabilities, and to support military preparations with the near-certainty of achieving surprise.
...The evidence of remarkable success with tactical intelligence will go far to restore Mossad’s credibility after the failures of the October 7 Hamas assault.
What this kind of intelligence success cannot tell us concerns the bigger question of Israeli strategic assessments of the Iranian nuclear weapons threat. We don’t know the details of that assessment and cannot judge how accurate it might have been. ..
...Benjamin Netanyahu signalled in his address that he had a different political objective in mind. Not to pressure the Iranian regime to agree to give up nuclear weapons, but to use a surprise attack and military force to engineer regime change in Iran....

And here's another good read -- for anyone who thinks that Iran will be easily defeated:
The Culture Explorer

Iran - A Civilization Disguised as a Headline
They tried to bury 5,000 years of poetry, empire, and memory beneath sanctions and fear, but Iran’s ruins still conjure what the world chose to forget.
What if I told you there’s a country that has more UNESCO World Heritage Sites than Egypt, stretches across four climate zones, neighbors more countries than any other in the Middle East and yet most headlines about it boil down to nukes and veils?
That country is Iran. And most people have no idea what they’re actually looking at...

And finally, I want to say this:
One of the things I remember most clearly from the buildup to the US war with Iraq 20+ years ago is a column from I, Cringely: The Pulpit, written by a journalist called Mark Stephens under the pseudonym Robert X. Cringely. 

I have written about this column several times on my blog, because it made such an impression on me. The column was nominally about the 2004 re-election of Bush, but it also featured Stephen's description of a 1986 incident in the eight-year Iran-Iraq War and what this incident taught him about how Iran and America would compare in "moral" determination:

...If the experts are correct, the 2004 election results mean we now live in a country where morality is apparently the major concern of people. Am I wrong, or is the same thing not true in Iran? And if our morality is in fundamental conflict with their morality, which side will be willing to sacrifice more to obtain what they view as their just end? I can tell you it ain't us.
Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: "How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran." The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.
I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.
It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.
Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.
Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn't get it and he'll proudly NEVER get it. Welcome to the New Morality.

As I have said before, I don't think Trump "gets it" either, and he knows even less about war and death than National Guard pilot Bush did.