Russia

The president has hobbled his own executive branch [on Russia policy], and the executive branch has hobbled its own president. It’s a three-legged race with the contestants going in opposite directions.

A presidential summit is usually the capstone meeting to confirm a pre-negotiated set of deliverables...and that’s not the case with Trump’s meeting with Putin...While it’s important to maintain dialogue between the U.S. and Russia at all levels...the Trump administration has flipped this protocol and is doing everything in reverse.

We still have no agenda for the Trump-Putin meeting. It’s unclear what the U.S. thinks it can get from Russia, or what it even hopes it can get...For Putin, that ambiguity is an asset. For Trump, it's a liability.

Déjà vu is one way of thinking about it...[NATO members] are trying to understand what [President Trump] might do, and watching how he's interacted with other authoritarians — Kim being the most prominent recent example...it's like Europe is almost powerless as they have to sit by and watch as their fates are decided by [Trump and Putin].

[President Trump's] boosterism for Britain’s departure from the European Union smacks of unseemly opportunism...The reality is that Brexit is now the law of the land. And the U.S. is acting now not like an ally but like a predator.