No matter what comes out of Monday’s summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has already lost. That’s thanks to a tweet the American commander-in-chief sent shortly after 9 a.m. in Helsinki:
Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2018
In one fell swoop, President Trump blamed poor U.S. relations with Russia on the “foolishness and stupidity” of his predecessors in the Oval Office as well as on a criminal and counterintelligence investigation, authorized by Trump’s own Department of Justice, that only days earlier indicted 12 Russian military intelligence agents for interference in the 2016 election. Trump did not attribute those bad relations on Putin’s aggressive incursion and annexation Crimea, territory held by our ally Ukraine, in 2014; not on Putin’s war against the sovereign state of Georgia six years earlier; not on more than a decade of Russian pressure on our allies in eastern Europe; not on Putin’s propping up of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria; not on Russia vetoing six U.S.-backed UN resolutions against Assad since 2012; not on Russia’s courting of ostensible U.S. ally Turkey away from Washington and into Moscow’s sphere of influence; not for Putin’s terrible record on freedom in his own country; and not for numerous other offenses to the free world Putin has so cavalierly made in his nearly two decades of power.
Needless to say, the previous two U.S. presidents have made grave errors in tactics and strategy with regard to Putin and his expansionist aims. George W. Bush, back at their first meeting in 2001, suggested he could see Putin’s soul and found him “trustworthy.” The former president recently said he thought Putin “changed” after that initial encounter thanks in an influx of cash into Russia due to higher oil prices. Barack Obama’s “reset” with Russia went nowhere fast, and despite his eleventh-hour warnings about Putin, the Obama administration’s record on Russia was deplorable:
The Obama administration has been even more accommodating behind the scenes. When congressional Republicans and the FBI urged the administration to enforce existing rules restricting travel of Russian “diplomats” inside the United States, the administration, citing concerns about provocation, refused. The “provocation” would have been our enforcing the rules, not the Russians’ violating them (often intelligence officials under diplomatic cover). When the pro-Western Ukrainian government begged the Obama administration for computer equipment and other non-lethal aid that might help thwart the Russian invasion of Crimea, the State Department repeatedly denied those requests and urged Ukraine—the country being overrun—to avoid escalating tensions. Even as the U.S. intelligence community accumulated evidence that Russians were complicit in the atrocities committed in Syria by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Obama administration proposed sharing sensitive intelligence with Russians in a “joint integration cell.”
There are fair criticisms for anyone, including President Trump, to make about our own accomodation of Putin. But for the American president, just hours before his big, agenda-less meeting with the man, to fault his own country publicly for a relationship that has deteriorated because of Russia’s violations of democratic and freedom-loving norms is nothing short of a propaganda victory for Moscow. And, lo and behold, the Russian foreign ministry agreed:
We agree https://t.co/7l087Qwmj3
— MFA Russia ?? (@mfa_russia) July 16, 2018
Here’s hoping Trump has brought up those violations in his private meeting with Putin in Helsinki. And it’s worth noting that Trump’s administration has been notably tougher on Putin’s Russia, taking the sorts of actions that would understandably worsen the relationship between the two countries—for justified reasons. But as the editors have noted, there’s reason to fear Putin will seek to drive a wedge between the president and his own administration’s policy. Regardless, the propaganda defeat for the United States is damaging enough.
