President-elect Donald Trump has made no secret of his interest in forging an improved relationship with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. On paper, there is nothing wrong with this. As Winston Churchill observed, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.”
The problem confronting Trump is the fundamental difference between how he perceives Putin’s interests and what Putin’s interests actually are. To improve U.S.-Russia relations in concert with U.S. interests, Trump must first recognize the true nature of Putin’s agenda.
Trump seems to believe Putin wants honest, direct dialogue and ensuing agreements that serve both U.S. and Russian interests. Only half of this assessment is accurate. While Putin values dialogue, he mainly views it as a mechanism for manipulating U.S. acquiescence to his grievances. Most of these grievances are either based on false history or on demands that the United States cannot agree to.
On the false history side of the ledger are Putin’s claims that the U.S. promised not to expand NATO after the Cold War, and Putin’s nationalist-imperialist narratives over the history of Russia and Europe. It is a rite of passage for American presidents and interviewers (such as Tucker Carlson) to listen to these grievances before Putin will start discussing the substance of a particular issue. Because Putin is eloquent and seemingly believes his otherwise delusional claims are true, one must have a strong understanding of history to be able to judge these claims skeptically. Putin isn’t sharing his grievances to earn sympathy as an end in itself. Instead, he wants to earn sympathy that he can translate into concessions from the person or nation with whom he is negotiating.
Most of the concessions he wants from America are not ones the U.S. can afford to give. Putin goal is to degrade the U.S.-led democratic alliance structure that has set the rules of the road since 1945. Imperfect as they might be, those rules have led to unprecedented American and global prosperity, security and technological advancement. Putin wants to replace this order with a chaotic free for all in which Western nations would act at one another’s expense in the absence of unified security guarantees.
This is not to say that America should put the interests of others before its own. Trump is correct in requiring NATO members to spend more on defense and in demanding trade deals that benefit Americans as much as they benefit foreigners. But were Putin to succeed in hollowing out NATO and the transatlantic alliance, the West’s concommitant decline in trust and cooperation would mean reduced trade and prosperity, declining stability, and far more avenues for China and Russia to pursue their interests at America’s expense.
Putin wants to be able to blackmail democracies bordering Russia and those bordering the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. That would mean those nations choosing Russian interests before those of the West. It would mean their dependence on Russia rather than on the West for energy supplies. It would mean open season for Russian corruption (the return of the oligarch glory days one men in absolute service of Putin). It would mean the destruction of democratic sovereignty either at the gun barrel of reconstituted Russian military power or via corrupt and covert actions such as assassinations etc. It would mean America abandoning allies to the scant mercies of a new Russian imperium. It would mean fewer avenues for trade, prosperity, and democratic stability.
Some suggest that such an imperium is impossible because of Russia’s economy is weak and the nation is in demographic decline. But Russians have shown a great willingness to accept hardship in return for national glory. Russia’s nuclear weapons and geographic size allow Moscow to multiply its otherwise limited national strength. Trump should also recognize that a reconstituted Russian imperium would not be contained in Europe. Eventually, it would reach America directly. Putin hates America and wishes to avenge Russia’s Cold War defeat. While he would be unlikely to attack America directly, though he might, we would probably see assassinations on American soil and other Russian hostilitities.
In practical terms, then, Trump must not allow himself to be fooled by Putin’s protestations that he seeks only mutually beneficial compromise. Unfortunately, Trump has shown himself vulnerable to delusions about such antics from Putin.
The former president has been too willing to dance to Putin’s nuclear escalation waltz, for example. Trump does not appear to realize that Putin is escalating nuclear exercises and deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus not because he is preparing for nuclear war but rather because he wants these actions to spark fear that deters Western support for Ukraine. In his first term, Trump responded to Russian nuclear threats by ordering the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons. Today, however, he now simply warns that unless the war in Ukraine is ended very soon, World War Three will follow. This feeds Putin’s belief that he can extract concessions simply by flaunting his nuclear arsenal.
That leads us to Trump’s ambitious aspiration of peacefully resolving the war in Ukraine, on which understanding the difference between reality and what Putin claims is hugely important.
Before meeting Putin, Trump should hold talks with Central and Eastern European leaders such as Polish President Andrzej Duda. He should seek their counsel on Russian strategic ambitions and Putin’s fictional history. There are good reasons to think this might happen. Trump and Duda already have a good personal relationship from Trump’s first term in office and met last weekend in Mar-a-Lago. The Poles know far better than most the Kremlin’s penchant for fiction. Putin and inner circle ideologues such as his senior aide Nikolai Patrushev even claim, absurdly, that Poland provoked the simultaneous Soviet-Nazi invasion of its territory in 1939!
This isn’t ultimately about history. Leaders from Poland and the Baltic states have the ability to posit a simple credibility test to Trump. They can ask him something along the lines of, ‘Who do you trust more, longstanding U.S. and NATO allies that will spend at least 2% and in one case nearly 5%-of-GDP on defense in 2025, which share your interest in strong borders , which are not Xi Jinping’s puppet like Viktor Orban), or a KGB trained liar who publicly mocks you and invades democracies?
This matters because Putin applies a similar mythology in his claims against Ukraine to those he applies to Poland, the Baltic states and, with Alexander Lukashenko’s calculated deference, Belarus. This context would help Trump see that contrary to Putin’s fantastically false historical essays, the Ukrainian people’s historic nationalist identity in separation from Russia is pronounced. This includes an historical legacy that begins with Catherine the Great’s annihilation of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and incidents in which the supposedly caring Mother Russia deliberately and callously starved millions of innocent Ukrainians. Knowing this, Trump can respond more effectively to Putin when he tries to persuade the president that Ukraine belongs to Russia.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Trump can achieve real and highly significant results for American interests if he deals with Putin with a firmer understanding of who the tyrant is and what he really wants. He can get a Ukraine peace deal worth a Nobel peace prize and Ukraine’s confident support. But if the president tempts himself to believe he’s dealing with a leader who wants the best for both of them, America and some of our best allies will pay dearly for it.
Put another way, Trump should aim to replicate the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in 1986 Reykjavik, not his own 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki.