President Trump will most likely welcome Vladimir Putin to Washington early next year, and the heated national debate over whether he is being too soft on the Russian leader will most likely still be in full force.
But by the time the former KGB officer steps into the White House, Congress and Trump will have finalized a draft of new defense legislation aimed at confronting Russia and rolling back its global influence.
The “laundry list” of initiatives in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, as a senior aide on an armed services committee called it, takes aim squarely at Moscow by beefing up funding of the U.S. military’s NATO presence in Europe, arming Ukraine, greenlighting a new nuclear warhead, and weaning potential allies off Russian weapons.
“We’re recognizing a transition from basically the challenges in the Middle East with regard to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and we’re moving back into the major powers challenges that face us today, which includes China and Russia,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Congress is set to wrap work on the NDAA in early August, meaning the policy bill is poised to become law before the fiscal year ends in October for the first time in about two decades.
The White House has yet to announce a date for Trump’s second summit with Putin following their controversial tete-a-tete and press conference in Helsinki this month. But it is already drawing some pushback from Republicans. House Speaker Paul Ryan said last week that Trump needs to deliver a strong message to Putin.
“We certainly will not be giving [Putin] an invitation to do a joint session” of Congress, Ryan said. “That’s something we do for our allies.”
Outside of its 2016 election meddling, much of the concern in Congress over Russia has centered on Eastern Europe since Putin annexed Crimea and surreptitiously sent forces in Ukraine to support breakaway rebels in 2014. The moves rattled NATO allies on the continent and sparked international condemnation.
Smaller nations on NATO’s eastern flank openly worry that Russia has similar plans for them.
The NDAA authorizes a new funding hike for U.S. forces there as part of a program called the European Deterrence Initiative that was created after Russia absorbed Crimea.
The $6.3 billion in the bill is up from $4.6 billion this year, and overall initiative funding has nearly doubled since 2017. The boost was requested by the Trump administration and backed by Congress.
About $1 billion would fund a rotating armored Army combat brigade on the continent at all times and an Army presence across Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. The bill sets aside $100 million specifically to bolster Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
“We invest substantial money in defense to make sure we thwart any aggression, certainly making sure we have the resources in Europe to assure our European allies that we will defend them,” said Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I had the opportunity to travel to Latvia and Lithuania and I know our allies there are very concerned about potential Russian aggression and want to make sure the U.S. will stand behind the NATO commitment and I think the NDAA expresses that support.”
The bill also authorizes $250 million to send more arms and aid to Ukraine as it wages a four-year-old war against the Moscow-backed rebels in the Donbass region along its eastern border with Russia.
Congress authorized lethal aid to Ukraine last year and the first shoulder-launched Javelin anti-tank missiles arrived in April. The missiles could be a potent deterrent to the T-72 tanks Moscow has secretly moved into the region as it seeks to reassert control over Ukraine, a former republic of the Soviet Union.
“Actions and words matter. On the action front Putin understands power and when you have boots on the ground in the Baltics, Poland, and we’re spending billions, we’re bringing armor back, he understands that,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, who sits on the Armed Services Committee. “A Javelin missile system that can take out a T-72 tank. There was nothing the Ukrainians had to kill Russia tanks so they got these, they got them in April, and he understands that, too.”
As tensions in Europe rise, Putin is also believed to have adopted a new “escalate to de-escalate” strategy that could employ nuclear weapons during smaller conflicts. The Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review released this year said the U.S. must develop its own smaller nuclear weapons to deter such a move.
The plan sparked opposition from many Democrats in Congress, but the policy bill backs the Pentagon’s efforts to field a new low-yield nuclear warhead that could be fired from submarines. It also authorizes $142 million for the National Nuclear Security Administration to help modernize the nuclear weapons stockpile and mend aging facilities.
“One of the biggest things is the work I’ve done on my subcommittee with the modernization of our nuclear forces and secondly missile defense, we’ve really beefed that up and that is extremely important,” said Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., who chairs the Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.
Congress is also giving the Pentagon a new way to use sanctions relief to help allies and undermine Russian influence around the world.
Last year, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act that imposes new penalties on Moscow for hacking and disinformation campaigns during the 2016 presidential election.
But Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wrote to lawmakers warning that sanctions under the law were penalizing friendly countries such as India that want to buy U.S. arms but are barred because they have done business with Russia in the past.
Sanctions waivers for those countries would allow them to move away from Moscow and instead build closer relationships with the United States, Mattis wrote in a letter to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., last week.
“As we impose necessary and well-deserved costs through existing sanctions, it is clear that we need additional tools to aggressively compete with Russia,” Mattis wrote. “We are faced with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to decrease Russia’s dominance in key regions, to build closer relationships with strategic partners.”
The NDAA granted the waivers, but only if countries meet stringent requirements aimed at eliminating any benefit to Moscow. They must show they are not part of a Russian intelligence service, not undermining the NATO alliance or U.S. coalition military operations abroad, and do not endanger U.S. military technology or defense cooperation.
Nations must also prove they are reducing dependence on Russia or that buying American arms is vital to U.S. national interests.
“This has all been about how the Russian government has figured out a way to go in like the mafia and at a very low cost stranglehold some countries that we think from a diplomatic and inter-operability perspective that we should have closer relationships with,” a senior armed services aide said. “Right now, once they have their stranglehold on them we are barred from being able to help them come closer to us.”
