@BillW,
I don't think Putin is that stupid. The price he'll pay for protecting Trump will not be worth it. Around the halls: Brookings experts react to the Trump-Putin meeting and NATO summit
Thomas Wright, Alina Polyakova, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Steven Pifer, Pavel K. Baev, Amanda Sloat, Célia Belin, Kemal Kirişci, and Tarun ChhabraMonday, July 16, 2018
This goal required Trump to demonstrate that he could simultaneously protect U.S. interests even while working with Putin and Russia. By instead appearing as Putin’s poodle, Trump undermined that goal. As the Russian state TV host Olga Skabeeva put it, “When Trump says our relations are bad because of American foolishness and stupidity, he really smells like an agent of the Kremlin.” If they can smell it even in Moscow, it must reek in Washington.
At the Helsinki press conference, one could almost see the moment that Putin realized that Trump had gone too far and that it would blow back against Russia in U.S. domestic politics. At the very end, after Trump had failed to even mention America’s opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Putin felt the need to spell out Trump’s position for him: “The posture of President Trump on Crimea is well known, and he stands firmly by it. He continues to maintain that it was illegal to annex it.” Even after Putin’s helpful prompt, Trump failed to step up and condemn the annexation, instead choosing to use his final intervention to once again bash the FBI. From the standpoint of the operative in the Kremlin, this episode neatly encapsulates the difference between a useful idiot and just an idiot.
COLD COMFORT
No one in the West should take comfort in Putin’s Trump problem. Even if the Helsinki summit did not go precisely according to the Russian script, it still demonstrated that the U.S. president does not support the NATO alliance or his own intelligence community in disputes with Russia. This undermines Western unity and fosters incoherence in U.S. policy, even if it also reinforces anti-Russian narratives in the West. The result, from a Russian standpoint, is a more hostile but also more ineffective adversary. The structuralist in Putin probably always saw limits in how effective Trump could be against America’s deep state anyway. An image from the summit of Western disarray and Russian confidence is a pretty good second-best outcome.
But forget the U.S.-Russian horse race. The greater tragedy is that worsening relations between Russia and the West won’t help Putin, Trump, or the world. As Trump emphasized, U.S.-Russian enmity is a threat to the world. It is in everyone’s interest for the leaders of the two countries to talk and make hard compromises. To do this, a U.S. president needs to both convince America that he will protect U.S. interests and convince the Russian president that he can get the country to accept certain concessions. It is always hard to reconcile these two competing goals. Impressively, Trump is failing at both.
