As Attorney General William Barr and Congress faced off over the handling of special council Robert Mueller’s report, President Trump wasted no time in getting back in touch with one of his favorite sympathetic ears: Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Twitter, Trump lauded his “long and very good conversation” with Putin and listed, among other discussion topics the “Russian Hoax” before pronouncing the whole conversation a “very productive talk!”
….We discussed Trade, Venezuela, Ukraine, North Korea, Nuclear Arms Control and even the “Russian Hoax.” Very productive talk!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2019
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve bilateral relations with countries like Russia. In fact, good bilateral relations, even with substantial policy disagreements, have long been a path to securing important agreements and treaties.
But there’s quite a difference between wanting to improve relations and just blindly taking Russia’s side. And the reportedly Trump-initiated call with Putin reeks of the later.
As Tom Rogan points out, just about everything that Trump included on his list of conversation topics was a bone of contention — not something the U.S. president should be be agreeing with Russia on. And so the idea of a positive call is ludicrous. That’s not to say that Trump couldn’t have had a “productive call,” just that if he had it would have a been difficult and unlikely to have been characterized as “positive.”
Instead of having a nice little chat with a dangerous adversary, Trump, for example, could have taken the opportunity to push back on the devastating Russian election interference outlined in volume one of the Mueller report and make clear to Putin that the U.S. would does not take such actions lightly. Trump might have worked to set up a new round of talk on nuclear arms control, perhaps taking the opportunity to talk up the mutual benefits of keeping the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. Or if that seemed too hard, Trump might have at least called for working on extending the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. A truly productive conversation on those treaties, of course, would not be so easily characterized as positive given the recent abandonment of INF and the seemingly scant interest in New START.
Trump isn’t wrong to talk with Putin, but agreeing with him and eagerly tweeting it about isn’t exactly what the president who claims to be all about protecting our national interest should be doing.
