5 things About A Trump-putin summit

1 THE SUMMIT

The White House announced Thursday that national security adviser John Bolton would travel to Moscow next week, after stops in London and Rome, to discuss the potential meeting between Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, expected to be held in the Austrian capital of Vienna in the days following NATO’S July 11-12 leaders’ summit in Brussels. Administration officials say a White House advance team has travelled to Vienna to scout locations and make other logistical preparations for a summit should it come off.

2 THE CONFLICT

As Trump presses ahead with plans for a summer summit with Putin, the U.S. president is jolting relationships with some of America’s longest and strongest allies. Nowhere, though, have the tensions crystallized more than in Europe, where concerns about Moscow are visceral and closer to home. In recent weeks, Trump has attacked Germany’s chancellor, ignored her and the leaders of Britain and France, embraced Italy’s new populist prime minister and congratulated Hungary’s authoritarian premier.

3 JOHN BOLTON’S ROLE

Bolton’s stops in Britain and Italy may be designed to assuage nervous Europeans about Trump’s intentions for the Putin meeting, but the hawkish Bolton’s discussions are unlikely to smooth over what are becoming widening fractures in the trans-atlantic relationship that the president has seemed to welcome.

4 THE RESPONSE

German President Frank-walter Steinmeier, in a speech in Los Angeles this week about democracy, warned the mounting damage to the trans-atlantic partnership “could be irreparable . ... I believe that the United States needs partners, and it needs these partners.”

5 TRUMP’S STANCE

Supporters of Trump’s argue that allies have taken advantage of the U.S. for decades, with America shouldering much of the burden for the West’s security and defence. They have also benefited from trade and economic policies that Trump’s administration believes are robbing the American economy. “The era of American complacency in the international marketplace is over,” Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote this month in an op-ed in The New York Times.