Dismissing bipartisan criticism and intelligence-community outrage, President Trump has doubled down on rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump has repeatedly surprised even his closest aides, first appearing to side with Putin over US intelligence agencies, and then failing to inform Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats that Putin would visit the United States just weeks before the midterm elections.
While Trump relishes unpredictability to keep opponents on edge, his own aides’ confusion suggests there is no coherence to Trump’s strategy. That, rather than “fake news” or “Trump derangement syndrome” about which the president complains, is the real source of American frustration. Democrats and Republicans both believe Putin is outplaying the president.
And that might be the silver lining in all this — the emerging bipartisan recognition of Russia’s threat and the possibility of Congress reasserting itself to check Moscow.
It’s true that Trump’s trust in Putin is no outlier: George W. Bush gazed into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul only to be confronted with a resurgent Russian nuclear force and the invasion of Georgia. That was no matter to Barack Obama, who continued to champion a “reset” with Russia, believing Bush was too unilateral and not sophisticated enough to conduct real diplomacy.
Indeed, it was Obama who lectured in July 2007 that “the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them . . . is ridiculous” and, five years later, ridiculed Mitt Romney when Romney identified Russia as America’s top geopolitical foe. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” Obama quipped.
Seldom has a country managed to gain so much with as weak a hand as Russia. Putin inherited a country decimated by decades of dictatorship, corruption and mismanagement. Rather than repair problems, Putin compounded them. But even as the United States held a royal flush, wishful thinking and partisanship effectively allowed the Kremlin to triumph with a pair of twos.
The problem in Washington is that national security has become a political football. Every president since Bill Clinton has entered office believing responsibility for international crises rest more with predecessors than adversaries. Trump’s July 16 tweet that “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity” is just the latest example.
What Trump misses, however, is that the true foolishness was past Russian accommodation: Bill Clinton not only allowed Russia alone among Soviet successor states to keep nuclear weapons, giving it tremendous leverage over its neighbors, but also extended hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees to the Kremlin. Obama and Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, withheld reports of Russian nuclear cheating from Congress in order to win a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, one which imposed more restrictions on the United States than Russia, and expelled Russian spies before thorough questioning.
Trump may believe his outreach to and praise for Putin will pay dividends, but, here too, he is wrong. Summits are a tool, not a strategy. Ronald Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev only after years spent building up a military advantage to use as negotiating leverage. When the two leaders did meet, Reagan refused to dismiss Soviet human-rights violations as an impediment to diplomacy, nor did he show any hesitation to walk away from the table, as he did at the 1986 Reykjavík summit.
But this is where the silver lining comes in: For the first time since the Cold War’s end, Democrats and Republicans (Trump and his most sycophantic advisers excepted) share a broad consensus that Putin is an insincere and malevolent actor who poses a grave and growing threat. Outrage after Helsinki shows Republicans will not follow Trump blindly and Democrats will be hard-pressed to return to their past naïveté.
Trump’s missteps could lay the groundwork for Congress to take the lead on an anti-Russia strategy: Bolstering aid to Eastern Europe, expanding the Magnitsky Act to hold even more Putin cronies responsible for human-rights abuses, directing the White House to report regularly and robustly on Russian cyber activities, beefing up US radio and TV broadcasts into Russia and restoring the US base in Iceland abandoned by Bush, to start; rolling back Russian influence abroad next.
Trump may deal with Putin, but Congress has the power of the purse and can play hardball in the face of a bad deal. Only one thing is certain: Partisan barbs and congressional inaction are a losing formula; they benefit only Putin. Winning will take congressional leadership, bipartisanship and proactive legislation.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.