Question of how leaders will gel
APPROACHES DIFFER BUT TWO MEN ARE SIMILAR Russia’s Putin is more low-key than brash American counterpart Trump.
As Donald Trump prepared to travel to Moscow five years ago for the Miss Universe pageant he wondered whether he would run into Vladimir Putin. “If so,” he wrote on Twitter, “will he become my new best friend?”
Today, as The Apprentice-host-turned-president gears up to meet with his ex-KGB Russian counterpart in Helsinki for their first summit, the world is asking a similar question.
Syria, election meddling and Ukraine will all be on the table, but much of the focus will be on the chemistry between the two men.
Trump has long expressed his admiration for the strongman leader, while United States intelligence services allege Putin ordered Russian intervention to tip the 2016 US presidential election and push the brash billionaire into the White House.
In terms of temperament and style, the presidents could scarcely be more different.
While Trump speaks off the cuff and often angrily contradicts his own advisors – or himself – Putin is never caught off-guard in public and rarely raises more than an eyebrow to express his emotions.
Putin keeps up to date via thick folders of intelligence reports and press summaries; Trump’s advisors reportedly struggle to get him to read even the shortest of briefings.
And whereas the US president throws his opinions out via social media, his opposite number in the Kremlin does not even own a smartphone – relying instead on domestic media to make his feelings known.
But their differences will not necessarily prevent the pair from bonding.
Alina Polyakova, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said: “Putin has proven himself to be incredibly savvy at reading personalities and characters.
“This is what he was trained to do as an intelligence officer, and I think he’s particularly been good at reading character weaknesses.
“He will praise Trump and try to bond with him in sort of a manto-man way. Trump will be responsive to that tack,” she added.
If this is the case, Putin will have some genuine similarities to tap into.
The pair share authoritarian tendencies. They both prefer making surprise, unilateral decisions to getting bogged down in the business of dealing with institutions or checks and balances.
And the two men are nationalists who promised to make their countries “great again”. – AFP