The most important thing for President Donald Trump to do while meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin is to have realistic expectations and to send a "very clear message" that "America is back," former Trump deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka said Monday.
"[There] are two things at bare minimum," the Fox News national security strategist told "Fox & Friends."
"Number one, that they create some kind of working relationship, even if our countries have very different interests that there is some kind of connection made between the two men."
Further, the two men must come to some kind of agreement on Syria, said Gorka.
"We are not going to get any kind of serious collaboration with Russia on major issues such as energy or China,' said Gorka, adding that it's "time for Putin to withdraw from Syria."
Gorka appeared on the program with former Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino and Rebeccah Heinrichs, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Bongino commented there will be some potential areas of disagreement, and likely to be no agreement all in some of those.
There has been some successful communications between the United States and Russia concerning the fight against international terrorism and on nuclear nonproliferation, but there will "probably not" be any kind of consensus opinion on those issues during the Trump-Putin conversation.
"Even some kind of communique or commitment to fighting that would be interesting," he said. "On the other side, the friction points, it's highly unlikely there is going to be, I think, any agreement on Syria. The Russian interests in there are not ours."
Bongino added that former President Obama began his administration "with an apology tour," and as there was then a policy of "strategic patience and leading from behind," the United States withdrew internationally and Putin "exploited that vacuum" in the Middle East and Europe.
"Now we have American leadership reasserted under Donald Trump," said Bongino. "We have become the global player. . . Putin wants to be relevant. This is the moment where he says 'okay, Russia is still here, can I still be an international actor?'"
The summit, therefore, is "much more important for Putin than it is for the president, because his relevance has been undermined and justly so, because he is a destabilizing actor in the world," said Bongino.
Heinrichs agreed that expectations should be low for the meeting, and there "shouldn't even be an attempt for a grand bargain" between the two leaders.
"[Trump] needs to carry a message with him, and that is that the Obama administration is out," Heinrichs said.
"The Trump administration is in. We are not going to take a posture of capitulation towards you. What Putin does is when he senses ambiguity or a lack of resolve, he exploits that, he finds soft spots and he pushes."
Trump should, she added, go through his list of points of disagreement and explicitly state his opinion on them, so there is no ambiguity for Putin.
"What that's going to do is foster a greater sense of trust and a greater sense of respect on the part of Putin and that's what's going to deter conflict and preserve peace," said Heinrichs.
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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