Delegates from 68 countries involved in the conflict against the Islamic State group will meet in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday for a summit officially designed to weigh future plans for the war campaign. But these leaders will also get a close-up look at what it will be like to work with this White House.

For those familiar with how these summits are usually conducted, the president and his team currently do not appear ready.

The State Department first announced earlier this month that the summit would take place, serving as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's inaugural major domestic event as the nation's chief diplomat, having just returned from his first overseas trip to Asia.

The key elements required for a summit of this scale do not seem to be in place, however. Only the secretaries of defense and state have begun work at their respective departments, while the other posts essential for making key decisions in war and foreign policy remain vacant. The White House has yet to come forward with any decisions out of the 30-day review the Pentagon conducted for changes to the war against the Islamic State group, and so far this week the executive branch has dedicated itself to publicly disputing accusations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. The summit did not even come up at Monday's White House press briefing.

President Barack Obama faced deep criticism regarding the war against the Islamic State group over accusations he didn't act aggressively or decisively enough. But at least he made his priorities known to his coalition counterparts.

"They knew what they had with Obama. Many of them didn't like it. The big problem now is they don't really know what they have with Trump," says Paul Salem, a vice president at the Middle East Institute.

As a candidate, as president-elect and now as commander-in-chief, Trump has vacillated on what his intentions are for the Middle East, focusing on protecting the border at home to claiming he would invade Iraq to "take the oil."

This week's meeting should put pressure on all sides. Coalition members visiting Washington will try to make sense of the intense political turmoil plaguing Trump's inaugural weeks in office, along with the mood of his top officials, the leadership structure of his cabinet and how decisions are being made.

For Trump and his team, the flood of expectant delegates arriving in the capital should force them to deliver on the key decisions the administration will have to make.

And those decisions must come soon. In Syria, all the major warring parties are growing increasingly anxious about the next steps in isolating the terrorist network's supposed capital of Raqqa, and where the remaining fighters will go after their defeat there. Perhaps most tenuous among these standoffs is between the Turkish military and the Kurdish force known as the YPG – a fighting unit that has seen some of the greatest successes in defeating the Islamic State group in Syria with U.S. backing. Ankara, however, and an increasingly truculent President Recip Tayyip Erdogan considers the YPG to be closely allied with terrorist groups at home, and seems poised to prevent their continued empowerment at any cost.

Meanwhile in Iraq, the elite Iraqi forces known as the Counter Terrorism Service are approaching the remaining bastions of Islamic State group fighters in west Mosul, where U.S. defense officials expect the fiercest fighting so far in the campaign to liberate Iraq's second-largest city. Military victory there, however, is only a matter of time. The difficult work begins afterward, in determining how each of the ethnic and religious groups will begin to rebuild their shattered homes, and cooperate with a central government in Baghdad that many don't trust.

This key issue of governance was at the center of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's discussions with Trump during the Iraqi leader's visit to Washington two days before the summit was scheduled to begin.

"I know for a fact nothing's been decided yet," says Michael Knights, a fellow with The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who recently returned from Iraq. "None of the policy reviews have yet been done."

Resolving these kinds of difficult nuances usually falls to lower-level senior members of the internationally oriented cabinet departments, positions like the under secretary of state for Political Affairs, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, or any of the key deputies.

However the Trump administration hasn't filled any of these positions, or even put forward a nominee for most, hindering his ability to create a prioritized strategy for this summit.

"What I find puzzling is going ahead with something which would normally require a huge amount of staff work at a time when the staff really isn't in place," says Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Normally this sort of thing would involve armies of aides drawing up planning documents, agenda, talking points, conclusion briefs on all kinds of things. The Trump administration doesn't have armies of aides working on these issues."

When asked on Monday, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the conference – the first since December 2014 – would serve as "an opportunity in the new administration to assess where we're at and what we want to do going forward." Plans for defeating the Islamic State group would likely be based on accelerating Obama's strategy and building on the successes of his administration, he said, along with determining which countries will focus on particular aspects of the war, from the air strikes for which the U.S. is overwhelmingly responsible to countering the terrorist networks' digital presence.

Establishing safe zones is among the tactics the group will consider, Toner said.

"I think it's an assessment period," Toner concluded, "but I also think there's going to be some new ideas put on the table."

In reality, says Alterman, the summit will set up the kind of structures the participants need to cooperate in the future, and allow the visiting delegations to demonstrate in person they're on Trump's side.

It will also allow them to take a close view of the situation in Washington, and begin to consider whether they should start looking to other world powers, like the European Union, China or Russia for support.