Marc Champion, Columnist

Putin Is Trump’s Brother From Another Motherland

The two men are unlikely to strike a grand bargain, but the EU and NATO are counting the ways the summit could go wrong.

July 9, 2018 at 4:01 AM UTC

By Marc Champion

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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This article is part of the July 16, 2018 issue of businessweek.

Forget for just a moment the allegations of Russian meddling in U.S. elections or of collusion by President Trump. His summit with Vladimir Putin has American allies in a state of high anxiety, because the two men have emerged as natural partners in the culture wars sweeping the globe.

There can be few more contrasting personalities than Putin, the disciplined ex-KGB agent, and Trump, the flamboyant former reality TV star. And the two men are unlikely to strike any grand bargain when they meet in Helsinki on July 16, if only because the rest of Washington would block it. Even so, Europe is counting the things that can go wrong.