Thomas Wright

[President Trump] has said on a number of occasions that he was prevented from working more closely with Putin in the first two years because of the Russia investigation...This is the first meeting with Putin since the Mueller report. And so if his own remarks are anything to go by, we may sort of expect to see him trying to open up a sort of deeper period of cooperation with Putin.

Everyone knows there’s like two different Trump foreign policies...There’s the official foreign policy, and then there’s the president’s, and normally they exist in tension. But the point in which the president’s one is strongest is on foreign trips. That’s when he is front and center.

[The transcript of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s interview with Secretary Rex Tillerson is] a significant document [that] confirms suspicions about dysfunctions in Trump’s foreign policy...If there was anything that said, "It’s better than it looks," that would be new...But that was not [in the transcript]. It was really, "It’s as bad or worse than you think."

Trump himself wants diplomacy...But it's been sort of bewildering to all of us as to what those talks would actually look like.

The progressive [2020 Democratic presidential candidates] seem to be suggesting you can significantly cut the budget while confronting Russia and China, which is wishful thinking at best, at least if one looks at the next four years.

We’re entering the third phase of the Trump administration’s foreign policy...Now comes the reckoning—in which [President Trump] is facing up to the consequences of his own choices and the contradictions within them...I think he had a bit of leeway because America has been as strong as it is, but on Iran and China and Venezuela and a variety of other issues, he’s facing tougher choices.