The Trump administration and the Senate are headed for a collision early next year over new and existing sanctions on Russia and whether the incoming president will want to unravel them while lawmakers on both sides of the aisle push for more.
The Russian hacking allegations and the Senate GOP leaders’ decision to back a bipartisan investigation into them has laid bare the deep divide between Trump and prominent Republicans on relations with Russia.
The horrific scenes from Syria’s Russian-backed offensive in Aleppo this week have only sharpened some lawmakers’ resolve to take greater action against Moscow, including additional sanctions.
Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire for a new Russian reset as a way to enlist support for fighting the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. He recently pushed back against the CIA’s findings that Russia was behind the hacking incidents.
It remains unclear, however, whether the incoming GOP president will try to lift sanctions that President Obama imposed in response to Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Ukraine and Russia’s annexation of Crimea — economic penalties imposed with broad bipartisan Congressional support.
There’s not much senators can do to prevent Trump from undoing existing sanctions. Trump could simply overturn the 2014 sanctions with a stroke of a pen. But the bold move to soften the U.S. stance against Russia would not come without consequences. It would inevitably draw rebukes from some of the most influential national security players in Washington, inflicting early damage to Trump’s relationship with Congress.
Senators from John McCain to Marco Rubio would undoubtedly lash out, and the move would put Republicans leaders like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who have spent years blasting Putin’s aggression, in the uncomfortable position of decrying one of the first foreign policy actions of the new GOP administration.
Democrats, infuriated over the CIA’s report on Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the campaign, are already planning ways to ratchet up the pressure on Republican lawmakers not to let the new president ease up on Putin.
Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, has repeatedly called for new sanctions against Moscow for its destabilizing moves around the world and is preparing Russia-focused legislation to offer in the new year that will likely include new penalties against sectors of the country’s economy, as well as against officials.
“[Cardin] believes the Ukrainian invasion, their support for Assad’s war crimes, and their cyberattacks on the United States warrant a comprehensive response from the international community that the United States leads,” his spokesman told the Examiner Wednesday.
Last month, Cardin mentioned McCain by name as a Republican he would like to work with on the issue, and the two recently passed a major human rights bill after writing it together.
In addition, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the former chairman of the Foreign Relations panel who helped build the sanctions regime against Iran, issued a blistering statement Wednesday decrying Russian and Iranian support for the devastating bombing campaign in Aleppo.
Afterward, Menendez’ spokesman said his boss believes additional sanctions are needed against Moscow.
“He is openly looking for and considering additional avenues to hold Russia accountable in light of their growing interventionism and aggressions across the world,” his spokesman said.
Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said lawmakers on both sides of the aisle others are right to push for new targeted sanctions against Moscow to hold Putin’s feet to the fire and push back against Trump’s willingness to warm up to Moscow.
“Mr. Trump is unlikely to be enthusiastic about new sanctions or even the preservation of old ones” – especially with conservative hardliner Francois Fillon or Trump-backer Marine Le Pen poised to win the French presidency next year, O’Hanlon told the Examiner.
That’s because if either win, European Union sanctions against Russia also are in jeopardy.
“But to me, that’s all the more reason for Congress to do its job, and its investigation — and to propose very targeted sanctions so that the case for them is harder to ignore, perhaps even for Trump,” he said.
The intra-GOP party tension is already palpable on the issue.
Rubio introduced a bill last week with Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., that mandates sanctions against foreign persons who threaten the stability of Iraq or Syria.
McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have yet to say whether they will try to push for new sanctions against Moscow or support Democratic efforts to do so. In the past, McCain has called out the Obama administration for weak enforcement of existing Russian sanctions.
Their offices did not respond to inquiries from the Examiner Wednesday, nor did a spokesman for the Trump Transition team.
But the pair of GOP lawmakers released a joint statement Tuesday condemning the Obama administration’s “leading from behind” policy on Syria that has resulted in Aleppo falling to the Russian-backed Assad regime forces.
McCain and Graham, along with Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, which McCain chairs, also came out earlier this week with a joint statement backing a bipartisan Congressional probe into Russian hacking.
Reed, during an interview with PBS Tuesday, said the U.S. should impose more sanctions on Russia over the hacking efforts to disrupt the U.S. presidential elections.
“Right now, we have sanctions in place because of their assault on the Crimea … if this rises [to] that level, we could certainly consider something like that,” Reed said.
