Editorial: Danger and Duty in Helsinki

Trump’s attitude to Putin and Russia is deeply conflicted, but it’s fair to characterize it by saying that he tends to praise Putin personally even as his administration sanctions Putin’s cronies and stiffens U.S. opposition to Russian military advancement in Ukraine and elsewhere. That has led some observers—surely Vladimir Putin is among them—to suspect that Trump himself isn’t calling the shots on his administration’s policy on Russia. From the Russian point of view, then, the Helsinki meeting serves as a valuable opportunity to extract promises from Trump that run counter to U.S. interests and the administration’s overall stance.

The perception that Trump is ready to give the farm away to his Russian counterpart is even more pronounced after last week’s meeting of NATO leaders in which Trump harangued his European allies almost as if they were adversaries. On Sunday the president further encouraged that perception by calling the European Union a “foe.” “Who is your biggest competitor, your biggest foe globally right now?” Trump was asked, to which he answered: “Well, I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe. Russia is a foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically, certainly. They’re a foe. But that doesn’t mean they’re bad. It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they’re competitors.” The president went on to qualify his characterization of the E.U. with the phrase “in the trade sense,” but the Russian leader will not fail to draw the conclusion that Trump is unhappy with his allies and ready to work more closely with Moscow.

Putin can therefore be counted on to seek major concessions. Among the biggest of those: a moratorium on U.S.-led NATO military exercises in Poland and the Baltic states. Putin considers those exercises a potential threat, and Trump temporarily suspended similar joint exercises with South Korea in a foolish concession to Kim Jong-Un. When Trump was asked last week about the NATO exercises he was noncommittal: “Perhaps we’ll talk about that.” We hope the president will not to talk about that. Russian expansionism is more than a rhetorical goblin—just ask residents of eastern Ukraine or Crimea—and the NATO drills serve to deter Russia’s designs on the states of eastern Europe.

Instead, we hope Trump will press Putin on Russia’s malicious activities in foreign elections, especially ours. Until now Trump has only raised the issue with Putin in a pusillanimous way, taking the dictator’s word for it that, as Trump put it, “he didn’t do it.” That won’t work anymore. On July 13 Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a 29-page indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton presidential campaign. The indictment details multiple attempts by Russian military operatives to throw the American presidential election into chaos. Trump doesn’t want to acknowledge these Russian efforts for obvious reasons—doing so would in his mind imply that his 2016 victory was unfairly won—but his duty as the nation’s president and commander-in-chief is to lay aside this emotional hang-up and insist, in private and in public, that the Russian government cease its meddling in American elections.

It’s rather incredible that Trump needs such a reminder. The US intelligence community has evidence that Russia is working to disrupt the November midterms, no doubt included in President Trump’s briefings. In a speech last week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned that attacks on US digital infrastructure have reached a “critical point” and that the system is “blinking red,” as it was in the days before 9/11. Russia is the “most aggressive foreign actor, no question,” Coats said. “And they continue their efforts to undermine our democracy.”

The top US intelligence official says Russia is aggressively attacking US digital infrastructure and our election, but the president he serves regularly dismisses and downplays Russia’s malign influence and sometimes even blames America.

Hours before the Trump-Putin summit, the US president did just that, tweeting: “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”

Russian propagandists couldn’t have said it better. To state the obvious: Russia, not the United States, is the primary cause of the strained relationship between the two countries. Russia consistently seeks to undermine American interests directly and indirectly—attacking our allies, strengthening our enemies, and targeting the pillars of our democratic republic. Russian behavior is that of an adversary—often that of an enemy. The “foolishness and stupidity” of U.S. policy towards Russia was the failure of the Obama administration to see this—to recognize Russian hostility and adjust our approach accordingly, rather than pushing a “reset” born of naiveté and wishful thinking.

Trump isn’t learning from these mistakes. He’s repeating them. And he’s doing so with ever more evidence of Russian aggression and despite the stark warnings of his top intelligence officials.

On Monday morning, hours before the meeting, a reporter asked the president about the imminent meeting. “We’ll do just fine,” Trump responded.

He may be right—depends on who he means by “we.”