Courting Putin, Trump jolts the West with a nationalist bent

As Donald Trump presses ahead with plans for a summer summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the U.S. president is jolting relationships with some of America’s longest and strongest allies. Amid concerns over Trump’s apparent desire to be cozy with the Russian leader, he is pursuing increasingly nationalistic foreign and trade policies and delivering scathing personal attacks on traditionally friendly leaders who don’t share his views.

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 Trump-Putin meeting, 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.

Bolton’s stops in Britain and Italy may be designed to assuage nervous Europeans about Trump’s intentions for the Putin meeting, which would come just weeks after Trump stunned European allies by suggesting that Russia should be re-admitted to the Group of Seven club of industrialized economies without forsaking its annexation of Crimea for which it was expelled in 2014.

Yet the hawkish Bolton’s discussions in the European capitals are unlikely to smooth over what are becoming widening fractures in the transAtlantic relationship that the president has seemed to welcome.