Past US-Russia summits required detailed preparation – but will Trump surprise us all?
History-making summits between the US and the Soviet Union are strewn through the decades, dripping with mutual suspicion but significantly shaping the course of events after the Cold War.
Think Nixon-Brezhnev in Moscow in 1972 when they signed a landmark arms treaty.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, left, shakes hands with President Ronald Reagan at the Geneva conference in November 1985. Pic: AP
Think Reagan-Gorbachev in Geneva and Reykjavik and others, which ended in limiting short and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
All these summits required huge planning and detailed preparation.
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Donald Trump’s summits are different, at least this one is. Hurriedly arranged and without much idea about what will emerge.
The US president is on record as saying there is a 25% chance it won’t be a success.
‘Putin won’t mess around with me’
The circumstances are very different. This time, it is about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of a sovereign country and how to bring the fighting to an end.
The fear is that Trump will once again give Putin the benefit of the doubt.
President Putin and President Donald Trump give a joint news conference in Helsinki in 2018. File pic: AP
I was in Helsinki in 2018 when there were sharp intakes of breath as Trump literally sided with the Russian president over his own intelligence chiefs.
Not privately, but in the news conference that followed. It was all about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
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Trump said: “My people came to me and they all said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin here and he says it wasn’t Russia and I have to say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
It was a pretty bad look, an American president undermining the work of the country’s intelligence agencies.
Former White House aide Fiona Hill on Capitol Hill in 2019. Pic: AP
Former Trump foreign policy advisor Fiona Hill remembers it well. She was there and was horrified.
She said afterwards that it literally crossed her mind to fake some kind of medical emergency to bring the whole thing to an end.
Here in Alaska, the plan is, once again, for Trump and Putin to have talks alone, other than translators.
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Their negotiating teams will eventually join them but Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are desperately worried that Trump will be outmanoeuvred.
The experienced, ruthless ex-KGB man is nothing if not a survivor and his aim is to buy time and continue the war.
This time, Trump has European leaders in his ear like never before. Will he listen and, more importantly, will he surprise us all?
