Trump’s team is clearly in a hurry – they need to show success in foreign policy right now and fulfil their promises. And then Trump’s ratings continue to fall. And the window of opportunity may close.
August is the perfect time for such a summit. There are still a few months to go before the 2026 congressional election campaign kicks off. It will force Trump to dive headfirst into electoral stories and, on a purely technical level, pay less attention to foreign policy. Plus, Congress is now on holiday for another four weeks. So the hawkish pressure on Trump has also eased.
There has been talk of holding such a summit since Trump’s inauguration. However, there were clearly fears of a repeat of the 2018 Helsinki meeting, which went nowhere. Since then, a post-traumatic syndrome has formed, which is now being overcome.
Trump’s team will certainly want to discuss three parallel tracks – Ukraine alone, then economic topics with sanctions and, finally, strategic security issues in the context of START-3 and other agreements. It is important for the Republicans to make progress on at least some issues, which can be “sold” to the electorate as a breakthrough achievement.
It is not for nothing that the White House is now constantly talking about progress in resolving the five wars, with the implication that they would like to say the same about the sixth and seventh wars (Ukraine and the Middle East). And then go with that agenda to the Peace Prize. In the meantime, Trump still has a lot of negotiations ahead of him. And the experience of the just-introduced tariffs has shown that he is ready to adjust his policy on the fly when faced with the principled nature of US counterparties.
