ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: Summing up the Trump-Putin meeting: good bonding; limited progress on Syria, Ukraine and cyber security

Effective Russian diplomacy meant that the first Trump-Putin summit though leading to no breakthroughs made important if limited progress on a number of topics whilst establishing a genuine connection between the two Presidents.

The single most important fact about the Trump-Putin meeting is that it went on for 2 hours, four times longer than planned.  What was supposed to be a brief encounter on the sidelines of the G20 summit became a deep and animated conversation the two men didn’t want to end.

In addition Putin came to the meeting clearly looking for progress on three specific points, which I suspect the Russians communicated to the US through Secretary of State Tillerson some time before.  These were (1) for a ceasefire in southern Syria; (2) for US involvement in the diplomacy Ukrainian conflict; and (3) for the establishment of a joint cyber security working group.

The first Trump-Putin summit, with Trump both inexperienced and under severe pressure at home, was never going to be an easy summit.  However it is striking that Russian diplomacy still managed to use this unpromising summit to make progress – however tentative and limited – on three important issues in a way that works towards achieving Russia’s objectives.

As for President Trump, he is to be commended for having accepted these proposals so quickly and so readily.  Doing so was as much in the US’s interests as in Russia’s interests.

This is how diplomacy is done.  Putin and the Russians in Hamburg gave Trump a class in how to do it, and he came out well, far better in my opinion than Barack Obama ever did.  That holds promise for the future.

In all respects this was a far better summit than the US-Chinese summit at Mar-a-Lago, which the Chinese sought too early, and which the inexperienced Trump was unsure how to host.For the rest, it seems that Trump and Putin genuinely got on with each other.

As regards personal relations, I believe that they have been established. This is how I see it: Mr Trump’s television image is very different from the real person; he is a very down to earth and direct person, and he has an absolutely adequate attitude towards the person he is talking with; he analyses things pretty fast and answers the questions he is asked or new ones that arise in the course of the discussion. So I think that if we build our relations in the vein of our yesterday’s meeting, there are good reasons to believe that we will be able to revive, at least partially, the level of interaction that we need.