Story highlights Miller and Sokolsky: While it's hard to predict what will happen when Trump and Putin meet at the G-20, they could both claim success without resolving core issues

This will likely be a transactional, not transformational, moment in the US-Russian relationship, Miller and Sokolsky write

Aaron David Miller is a vice president and distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of "The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President." Miller was a Middle East negotiator in Democratic and Republican administrations. Follow him @aarondmiller2. Richard Sokolsky is a non-resident senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 2005-2015, he served as a member of the Secretary of State's Office of Policy Planning. The views expressed in this commentary are their own.

(CNN) With two unpredictable leaders -- Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump -- and their propensity for risk-taking, there's no way to say with certainty what will result from Friday's bilateral summit meeting on the margins of the G-20 economic summit. We're sorely tempted to conclude that the meeting, like the "Seinfeld" episode in which George and Jerry try to sell a TV pilot episode for a show about nothing, will turn out much the same.

But the unique mix of personalities, politics, Trump's seemingly preternatural desire to work some deal with Putin, and now the formal character of the meeting, suggest the possibility of a positive outcome that allows both leaders to claim success without resolving the core issues that divide them.

No one should be fooled by a post-summit communique that sets up working groups to deal with outstanding issues. Fundamental differences between Moscow and Washington on core issues all but guarantee that, at best, this will be a transactional and not transformational moment in the US-Russian relationship.

Aaron David Miller

Richard Sokolsky

The world's attention is focused on the intractable North Korean problem, but the Russians have very little to offer there. There is greater basis for optimism in the Middle East, where, at least on paper, Washington and Moscow have some coincidence of interests in combatting ISIS. But even here, Trump is probably overestimating Putin's utility in this endeavor and underestimating the risks of such a partnership.

In the run-up to and for a short time after last November's presidential election, pundits speculated that Trump and Putin might try to strike a grand bargain that would resolve all the global issues dividing them -- European security, cyber warfare, Ukraine, Syria and arms control, to name only a few.

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