Foreign affairs are never simple. But President Trump and his critics are offering reductive explanations that are both facile and dangerous. They need correction.
Trump and some of his allies wrongly assert that criticism of Trump’s coziness with Putin is a call for war. Meanwhile some Democratic lawmakers try to exaggerate Trump’s errors by declaring that Russia is already waging war on us. Finally, realpolitik compels the U.S. to deal pragmatically with characters as wicked as Putin, but the need to do so doesn’t mean we should deny his wickedness.
[Related: Trump to Putin: ‘The world wants to see us get along’]
“Some people HATE the fact that I got along well with President Putin of Russia,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning. “They would rather go to war than see this.” Trump may have been channeling Fox News from the night before when an NYU professor said the choice was, “Do you prefer trying to impeach Trump to trying to avert war with nuclear Russia? That’s the bottom line, and that’s where we’re at today.”
Underlying these assertions was the false dichotomy between Trump’s solicitousness of Putin on the one hand, and war with a nuclear power on the other. Implied is that anyone who doesn’t want war should be cool with Trump’s equivalencies between the U.S. and Russia, Trump’s denial of Russia’s meddling in our elections, and Trump’s apparent acquiescence to Russia’s invasions of Georgia and Ukraine.
To say this is not to suggest that Trump should have spent the Helsinki press conference berating Putin for his aggression on the former Soviet states, Russia’s chemical weapons attacks in the U.K., their human rights abuses, and so on. But there are ways to be simultaneously diplomatic and tough. Trump and his defenders seem to pretend that one must choose one or the other.
A sensible and principled approach to Russia would include firm public confrontation of Putin on his misdeeds, and a warning to cut it out. At the very least, Trump should have stood up for his own country, and said that if Russia meddles again in 2018 or 2020, there will be serious and substantive consequences. And no, consequences, doesn’t always mean war. It can mean painful economic sanctions. It can mean political isolation. It can mean cyber countermeasures.
On that score, it’s neither true nor helpful that Democrats try to bolster their unhinged cries of “treason” with the claim that Russia’s meddling in 2016 was an act of war. “Russia is a dangerous adversary who attacked the United States,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said last year. “I’d argue to you that it was an act of war by an enemy.”
This definition of war is meaningless. If Russia is “waging war” on us by hacking email accounts, then who isn’t at war with whom? Russia is a malignant force in the world and an aggressive adversary, but calling it an enemy at war with us is dumb reductive oversimplification.
Finally, the fact that Russia is a bad guy doesn’t mean we can’t associate with it. Trump seems to miss this distinction when he defends Russia by pointing to the potential for cooperation and the desirability of good relations between the two countries.
Diplomacy and foreign affairs are messy. Realpolitik always necessarily play a role, and we can’t be afraid to deal with evil doers when necessary. We did this in the World Wars and in the Cold War, and we’ve done it in our battle against terrorists.
But partnering with a country that does evil shouldn’t drive us to call that evil thing good. Our relations with Russia are messy. The last thing we should do is simplify it, and thus rush into error.
