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Summing up the Trump Summits

Traditionally, one-on-one meetings between government leaders are scheduled only after months, or even years, of careful preparation by lower-ranking officials have narrowed or eliminated disagreements. By turning this sequence around, Donald Trump is fueling, rather than mitigating, global uncertainty.

NEW YORK – US President Donald Trump’s summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki are history, as is the G7 summit in Quebec and the NATO summit in Brussels. But already there is talk of another Trump-Putin summit in Washington, DC, sometime later this year. Some 30 years after the end of the Cold War, a four-decade era often punctuated by high-stakes, high-level encounters between American presidents and their Soviet counterparts, summits are back in fashion.

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