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Trump may want success in summit with Lee after no-deal meeting with Putin: Expert

Published: 19 Aug. 2025, 08:50 Updated: 19 Aug. 2025, 08:55

Korean President Lee Jae-myung, left, and U.S. President Donald Trump. [YONHAP]

U.S. President Donald Trump may want a success from next week's summit with Korean President Lee Jae Myung given that his high-profile talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week ended without a concrete deal, a U.S. expert said Monday.

Victor Cha, president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), made the remarks during a CSIS podcast, as Trump is set to meet with Lee at the White House next Monday, after he failed Friday to reach a deal with Putin over the war in Ukraine

"The U.S. president probably wants a success next week. He doesn't like failure to be followed by failure. So, he's probably going to want some sort of success next week," Cha said.

"And that may bode well for the meeting in addition to the fact that Koreans have put a lot on the table already, with $350 billion plus the shipbuilding," he added, referring to last month's trade deal under which Seoul agreed to invest $350 billion in the United States, among other things.

Cha cast Trump's summit with Putin in Alaska as "not really a big win" for Trump, while recalling the no-deal summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi in February 2019.

After his talks with Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Trump said the two sides agreed on "many points," but they "haven't quite got there" regarding "a couple of big ones," as he pointed out, "There is no deal until there is a deal."

"[Trump and Kim] didn't even have the lunch that was supposed to be scheduled between the two of them, according to some of the press reporting," Cha said. "Not unlike what President Trump did to Kim Jong-un in Hanoi when he left the summit early, saying there was no deal here."

During the podcast, Sydney Seiler, former intelligence officer at the U.S. National Intelligence Council, anticipated that Lee and Trump will be able to "strike it off at a certain level."

"Or [they will be able to] at least project an image that Lee Jae Myung is no less a viable counterpart for the U.S. leader than any conservative might be," he said.

Seiler also dismissed concerns that an embarrassing moment seen during the summit between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February would happen again.

"I don't think that will happen. Obviously, the dynamic is very different," he said.

"I think President Trump has respect for South Korea. I think he knows the path that President Lee Jae Myung came to office in, and so he knows that he's got a viable counterpart."

But he raised the possibility that China-related issues could be a "black swan."

"If the president somehow feels that he needs to elicit some more public statements from Lee Jae Myung as a partner in countering the Chinese economic and military threat, that might put President Lee in a position that would take him beyond his talking points, where he's still hesitating to full orient with the U.S."

Yonhap