Why Does Trump Want to Meet With Putin, and What Are the Risks?

There is nobody with more confidence in President Trump’s deal-making abilities than Trump himself.

Yet, as his Friday meeting in Alaska with President Vladimir Putin of Russia draws near, he and his top aides are lowering expectations, suggesting it’s not Trump’s job to make peace between Moscow and Ukraine and calling the summit little more than a “listening exercise.”

Statements like that belie the enormous stakes of the first meeting between Trump and Putin since the Russian invasion, particularly for the parties who aren’t expected to be present, which includes the leadership of Ukraine and of the European nations that have been living with the war on their doorstep. For Trump, though, the motivation is personal — it’s a chance to reset a relationship he has long boasted about but has lately become rocky, while bringing his personal brand of deal-making to the world’s biggest stage.

There’s a lot going on here. So I called David Sanger, who has covered the White House and national security for decades and who has written books about superpower conflict, before he boarded a series of flights to Anchorage earlier today.

He walked me through the calculus of risk and reward around this meeting — and why Putin can claim a modest win before it even starts.

As you’ve written, it used to be normal for an American president to meet with the Russian leader. George W. Bush met with Putin roughly two dozen times. Joe Biden met him only once, in 2021. But Trump’s meeting will be the first for an American president since the Western world isolated Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. What does he stand to gain from it?

Trump sees himself as a peacemaker, and this is tied up very much in his oft-expressed desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which he usually combines with some kind of comment to suggest that the Nobel Committee would never give it to him.