Evie Fordham on July 15, 2018

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman called President Donald Trump “the most experienced negotiator ever elected to the presidency” ahead of Trump’s summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on “Fox & Friends” on Sunday morning.

“I can tell you that in the president, we have the most experienced negotiator ever elected to the presidency,” Huntsman said. “You have a lot of presidents who have never had a negotiation before, unbelievable as that sounds, before they were elected president. So the president has pretty good instincts on these kinds of things.”

Huntsman discussed U.S. strategy going into the talks in Helsinki, Finland, on the show. The summit will be the first time that Trump and Putin have had a one-on-one meeting.

“We need to reduce the tension in the relationship,” the ambassador said. “We need to take the danger to the American people out of a bilateral relationship, a relationship that contains 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons … You have to build trust in a relationship that has none.”

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He listed some of the challenges Trump will face at the summit.

“[The U.S. and Russia are] not talking with one another,” he said. “We’re talking past one another. We have issues that have built up … And then you come to the realization, as every president does, that in order to solve certain problems in the world you’ve got to work collaboratively. So it’s inconceivable that you can put out some of the fires in the Middle East without the United States and Russia working together in Syria.”

The U.S. and Russia have plenty of common interests like nuclear stability and defeating ISIS that will bring them together, Huntsman said.

“We’re informed by the past, what we’ve learned and what they have done,” he said. “We’re going to put our cards on the table, we’re going to look at theirs and we’re going to see where we have overlapping interests.”

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