The just-announced summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin is a complete waste of time.
Don’t get me wrong; I understand why the prospect of a sit-down seems sensible. Scheduled for July 16, in Helsinki, Finland, Trump hopes to win progress from Putin on issues related to Ukraine, Syria, Iran’s nuclear program, Russian cyberactivity, and Russian breaches of United Nations sanctions on North Korea.
In a normal situation, those varied and important concerns would justify a presidential meeting.
The problem is that Putin’s sense of “normal” is fundamentally incompatible with American interests. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both learned that while you can meet Putin and share smiling press conferences, you can’t get ahead by doing so. Obama sacrificed a great deal of personal and U.S. credibility by failing to push back against Putin when the Russian leader did what he always does: offering compromises then testing U.S. resolve by degrading U.S. interests.
Thanks to the past, I can predict with high confidence how the Helsinki summit is going to go.
Putin will offer Trump some kind of compromise that appears to give Trump a marginal win over his Russian counterpart. Putin will appear to do so grudgingly, only after hours of tough negotiations that let Trump think he has scored an artful deal. Trump will then be asked to surrender a lesser compromise, perhaps even a simple statement on an issue.
But the outcome will be the inverse of the promise. It may appear to work for a few weeks or even, as with the cease-fire in southern Syria that Russia has just annihilated, a few months. But ultimately, Putin will never live up to anything that serves U.S. interests. Eventually, it will become clear as it has so many times before that Putin has played a president for a fool.
This dynamic is so predictable not simply because of history, but also because of Putin’s perception of Russian interests. Those interests exist in fundamental conflict with U.S. interests.
That speaks to the broader concern.
It’s easy to regard summits as win-win scenarios which builds personal rapport and trust even if nothing else. But Vladimir Putin always has the end game in mind: building Russian influence over Europe, fraying U.S. alliances and prospective partnerships, and re-orienting international order away from the U.S. rules-based system towards a Russian mercantilism-feudal system.
This Helsinki summit will be nothing more than another act in Putin’s great game against America.
