On Russia, it’s Trump versus the Trump administration.
By
Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vo
On
March 20, 16 days after Russia operatives poisoned an ex-spy and his daughter
near the homes in the UK, President Trump called Vladimir Putin. It wasn’t to
tell the Russian strongman that he’d crossed a line, or to promise swift
retribution if Moscow used a deadly nerve agent outside its borders ever
again.
Instead,
they had a friendly chat where they discussed meeting in person — potentially at
the White House.
The
call is noteworthy for its substance — Putin hasn’t visited the US since 2015 —
and for its timing.
At
the time of the call, the UK had already expelled 23 Russian diplomats in
retaliation for Russia’s poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal and his
daughter Yulia in the British town of Salisbury. On March 26, six days after the
call, the United States and about 20 other countries would join Britain in
expelling Russian officials, leading to a total of 150 Russians being sent back
home.
So
in the midst of a massive Western campaign to isolate Russia and punish it
diplomatically, Trump was chatting with Putin about a potential trip to
Washington. The disconnect points to the defining aspect of America’s Russia
policy: a contradiction between the president’s pro-Putin words and the actual
policy steps taken by the administration to punish Russia for its misbehavior
around the world.
“Dysfunction,
incoherence, and mixed signals are the mainstays of Russia policy in the age of
Trump,” says Andrew Weiss, a leading Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace.
The
root of the problem, experts say, is that what Trump says bears little to no
relationship with what his administration actually ends up doing. Trump insists
on treating Putin as a potential partner but doesn’t really use the levers of
policy — diplomatic agreements, military deployments, and the like — to try to
make this vision a reality. Instead, policy appears to be set by the American
national security bureaucracy, which sees Russia as a rival and adversary.
“Not
since the runup to the Iraq War has there been such a startling consensus within
the administration and the DC foreign policy community on a foreign policy
issue,” says Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on
Foreign Relations. “There’s just one important outlier — but he is the president
of the United States.”
The
result is that Trump proposes one policy while his administration implements a
different one. Sanctions punishing Russia for election hacking even though Trump
is loath to admit Putin was behind it; arms and troops to Eastern Europe even
though Trump won’t condemn the Ukraine invasion; United Nations Ambassador Nikki
Haley continually condemns Syria’s Bashar al-Assad Assad even though Trump won’t
condemn Putin for keeping him in power.
When
it comes to Russia, it isn’t simply Washington facing off with Moscow. It’s an
American president facing off with his own administration.
The
many, many Russia contradictions
If
you just went by what Donald Trump said, it would seem as if US-Russia relations
were at their strongest point in recent history. Trump congratulated Putin on
his (obviously fraudulent) reelection last month, has continually mocked and
rejected the US intelligence community’s unanimous belief that Russia interfered
in the 2016 election, and publicly questioned the value of the NATO
alliance.
But
if you look at what his administration has actually done, you’d get the sense
that we’re nearly back to the Cold War era. In the past year, the US has:
- Provided anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, something the Obama administration was never willing to do
- Slapped new sanctions on Russian nationals and organizations
- Deployed about 900 troops to Poland and stationed them roughly 100 miles from the Russian border — a deployment explicitly billed as an effort to deter Russian military adventurism and reinforce America’s commitment to NATO
- And, just last week, oversaw the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats and spies in US history
This
is not how foreign policy is supposed to work.
The
president, in consultation with his Cabinet, is supposed to decide on an overall
approach that reflects his view of the issue in question. Specific policies are
designed to advance whatever the overall goal is; presidential statements
explain this goal to the public and serve as an independent source of pressure
(the “bully pulpit” effect).
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