G7: President Trump created a quite a stir among the other Western leaders by refusing to sign the "communique" that capped the G7 summit. But he was right to do so.

This is once again being styled as the crude, unnuanced American president refusing to accommodate himself to the much wiser leaders of Europe.
In  fact, he wisely refrained from signing what was an empty, far-left political document, which is typical of the G7 "consensus" that American presidents have gone along with for decades.
We're indebted to Susan Jones of CNSNews.com who pored over the entire tedious document from the Charlevoix G7 Summit in Canada to extract the nuggets.

It held a panoply of meaningless leftist buzzwords that the U.S. was supposed to embrace, including "such phrases as 'sustainable development,' 'gender equality and women's empowerment,' 'fair' and 'progressive' tax systems, a 'level playing field,' 'affordable healthcare,' a 'healthy planet,' and 'quality work environments.' "
None of those thing, by the way, have anything whatsoever to do with government. As a matter of fact, intervention of incompetent governments makes most of those things measurably worse.
All told, the communique contains 27 points made in five major sections. All of them enlighten citizens around the world about how to think about everything, from gender and jobs to peace and climate change.
The leadership of the nations allied with the U.S. come up short. They've ridden the anti-Trump wave of the so-called Progressives, rolling their eyes at his comments and acting as if he, not they, are the problem.
That's particularly true of trade.
The summit communique, for instance, exhorts G7 members to "reduce tariff bers, non-tariff barriers and subsidies."
A reasonable  goal, most economists would agree. The G7 leaders get angry at Trump because he believes that current trade deals, while good on some levels, actually are unfair to the U.S. Whether you agree or not, it's certainly a debatable point, particularly with regard to trade with China.
But what did Trump say at his press conference as he left the fruitless G7 confab to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un?
"You want a tariff-free (trade system), you want no barriers, and you want no subsidies because you have some cases where countries are subsidizing industries, and that's not fair,"  Trump said, elaborating his own ideas about trade, developed, he said, from his time at the Wharton School of Finance. "So you go tariff-free, you go barrier-free, you go subsidy-free."
Sounds pretty free trade to us. The fact that he questions current trade deals doesn't signal a hatred of free trade. It does show a disdain for deals that pretend to be free trade but are really government managed trade. Often to the U.S.' detriment.
As we've said here before literally dozens of times, we at IBD have always maintained that free trade is a great benefit to humankind.
It lets all people satisfy their wants and needs from those who most able to satisfy them at the lowest price. That's how human material well-being advances.
G7 And Tariffs: Hypocrisy On Display
Trump's idea of making tariffs identical from one nation to the next may be politically naive (and may not, for that matter), but it's not insincere. Nor is his anger over still-large tariffs on U.S. goods invalid.
The supposed leaders of the free world, as embodied in the G7, should recognize that not all the global trade system is equitable — and that, as Trump says, the old protectionist ways that harm the U.S. economy, must come to an end.
Based on its recent performances, the G7 summit has outlived its usefulness. It has become an opportunity for troubled European leaders to preen and pose for cameras, speak progressive platitudes, engage in a little anti-Americanism, but do little if anything of substance.
This G7 meeting, in which all the U.S. allies agreed that Trump was awful, was no different. It was the essence of multi-lateralism: Lots of noise and pageantry, entirely stage-managed, but ultimately empty.