Trump suggests that he meet with Iranian President Rouhani

The spectacle of these summits surely appeals to Trump's taste for theatricality and bonanzas ratings – for "victories" made on TV. But they are also critical elements of a process that Trump seems to have pursued with threats of war with the North. Korea, trade war with the European Union, and now a confrontation with Iran: escalate the tensions in order to defuse them, then claim victory. "Start by insulting from the other side," wrote Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post last week, summing up the approach. "Threaten the extreme consequences.Then, meet the other side, backpedal, and triumphantly announce that you have saved the world from a crisis that your rhetoric and actions have caused in the first place." In the North-American case Korean, it took Trump eight months for "fire and fury" to offer a summit. In the case of Iran, the passage of unprecedented threats of destruction to offers of unprecedented diplomatic engagement took about a week – although it can always go back.

The summit between leaders and in particular the private one-on-one sit between these leaders without the present advisers – is also a pure digest of what seems to be Trump's favorite method for managing business International: a coercive, transactional and highly personalized bilateralism in which, as recently stated political theorist Danielle Allen, Global politics is conducted as a series of transactions with Donald Trump. "The summit is the equivalent in foreign policy of Trump's famous statement during the presidential campaign which, when it comes to the many American afflictions," I can only fix it. "To solve the North Korean nuclear crisis, it is not a complicated six-party negotiation, but rather Trump's assessment of Kim Jong Un in the seconds following his meeting. Multinational agreement with Iran and offers a one-on-one meeting with the Iranian leader instead. "We could work on something meaningful," Trump explained on Monday, "not the waste of paper that the case [Iran] was. "

Trump administration officials acknowledged the pivotal role that the summit is currently playing in. Foreign relations." The summit is in itself an important element " said Jon Huntsman, US ambassador to Russia, during a phone briefing before Trump met Putin in Helsinki, Finland. (National Security Advisor John Bolton said almost exactly the same thing .) "I would just like to mention the summit with Kim Jong Un, who has already shown the opportunity to reduce tension on the Korean peninsula and certainly throughout North Asia. And if you can imagine what the reduced voltage could do in the case of the United States Russia and Europe-Russia, it would be on a much larger scale. "

The disadvantage of this approach is that sometimes a summit is just a top, not a solution." Trump's meeting with Kim Jong Un certainly reduced tensions in the Korean peninsula, but up here , North Korea has not made any major concessions on its nuclear weapons program – the reason why Trump met Kim in the first place.The summit with Putin has, in the short term at least, increased tensions between the United States and Russia because of Trump's refusal to confront Putin to Russia's interference in the 2016 US elections, without giving any concrete results – yet-not even a joint declaration of the summit.