Long-term improvement in relations not likely

Trump's meeting with Putin was in accordance with his "America first" policy, as the US president prefers bilateral agreements, when not taking unilateral actions, to multilateral agreements and cooperation mechanisms. That's why Trump pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, and confronted the other G7 leaders in Canada and criticized the US' NATO allies in Brussels at their recent summits.

However, despite Trump saying he is trying to improve relations with Russia to fulfill the promise he made during his election campaign, US-Russia ties are unlikely to improve. Over the past decades, Russia-US ties have shown a familiar up-and-down pattern: bilateral relations improved when a newly elected US president tried to achieve diplomatic "breakthroughs", but worsened toward the end of his term in office. The presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama exhibited this pattern. Trump's term is also likely to reflect the same pattern, notwithstanding his expressed wish to improve relations with Russia.

Besides, disputes between the two sides could prevent the improvement of bilateral ties. For example, the US and Russia have not reached any deals on the regional missile defense system and military deployment nor do they have an agreement on whether the security mechanism in Europe should be inclusive or exclusive of Russia. Some other issues that Washington and Moscow don't see eye to eye are Russia's traditional interests in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, and Russian territorial claims.

And if the Ukraine crisis saw the West, especially the US, severely criticizing Russia, the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US election have raised the anti-Russia wave in the US to a peak.

Because of these factors, the Trump-Putin meeting is likely to have a short-term influence in geopolitics, and may not be able to improve bilateral ties in the long run.

Fan Jishe, a researcher at the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences