The upcoming meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is a "good thing," as it will allow Trump to confront the Russian leader about meddling in the 2016 election and for the two to begin peace talks, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis said Sunday.
"We ought to be exploring with President Putin how we can cooperate to end this terrible war in Syria," the retired admiral and dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University told radio show host John Catsimatidis in an interview on "The Cat's Roundtable" airing Sunday on AM 970 in New York.
The solution to the ongoing war in Syria won't be solved on the battlefield, Stavridis said, but instead will "require a diplomatic resolution, and only the United States and Russia working together can resolve it."
However, it's clear that with Russia assisting Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, he "is not going anywhere," Stavridis said, "so rather than end up in a situation where another 500,000 people die, I think it is time to have a political accommodation."
Trump and Putin will meet on the sidelines of next week's G-20 summit, being held Friday and Saturday in Hamburg, Germany, marking their first face-to-face meeting since Trump was inaugurated in January.
The meeting was confirmed Thursday by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, reports The Hill, after Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters the meeting would take place.
According to McMaster, there has been no agenda set yet for the meeting, but Stavridis said the matchup will be a good time to discuss the war and the election.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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