Trump Should Stop Hosting Summits

Tom Nichols: “Summits are a problem in this administration for two reasons. The most important is that Trump’s unpredictability and obvious lack of preparation make them dangerous. State visits require a lot of political groundwork, and leaders rarely go into top-level meetings without a set of issues they’ve already agreed to discuss. This agenda-setting gets done long before a president actually sits down with another head of state so that stray asides (or rising tempers) do not derail whatever business needs to be discussed.”

“The grim outcomes of previous summits with Trump, however, suggest that they are seat-of-the-pants affairs, with little preparation, or perhaps with preparation that was ignored by the president.”