During his presidential election campaign in the United States, Donald Trump had promised to improve America’s relations with Russia. His supporters said it was just the kind of bold move the world needed as escalating hostilities between the two nations stood in the way of solving major global issues from Syria to cybersecurity.
Trump’s opponents, to this day, see his rhetorical olive branch to Moscow as nothing less than a debt being repaid for alleged Russian meddling during last year’s presidential election campaign — and who knows what other favours exchanged over the years.
But now, six months into Trump’s presidency, the prospect of building a strong US-Russia alliance (for whatever motivation) is looking slim. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced last Sunday that he was forcing Washington to cut 755 diplomatic staff members in Russia in what seems to be a tit-for-tat response to America’s latest sanctions bill against Russia.
Speaking to the state-run Rossiya 1 television network, the Russian president made his disappointment with Washington clear. “We waited for quite a long time that, perhaps, something will change for the better. We held out hope that the situation would somehow change,” he said. “But, judging by everything, if it changes, it will not be soon.”
Putin characterised the measures as “biting”, and warned that more options were at his disposal. Still, some analysts have a very different reading of Moscow’s counter-sanctions. Quoted in the New York Times, Vladimir Frolov, a foreign affairs analyst and columnist, said that this was “the least painful response that Russia could have come up with”.
Alexander Baunov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, noted that the timing made the measures look more “like a response to Congress, not to Trump”.
Either way, if the move tells us little about the meanderings of evermore complex US-Russia (and Trump-Putin) relations, it offers an interesting insight into the Russian president’s mindset.
Military power
Putin is often described as a “bully” with a penchant for macho poses, whose policy in both Syria and Ukraine are signs of an emboldened and imperial Russia. Yet, this is not the full picture. In a piece penned for Le Monde by Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, explains that Putin, and for historical reasons Russia in general, has an “irrational fear of weakness”.
For better or worse, Putin has managed to restore Moscow as a diplomatic and military power to be reckoned with. But to be truly successful, Lukyanov writes, Russia needs “more than military and political force”.
A quick glance at the declining rate of US-Russia trade over the past six years, which began even before the first wave of sanctions linked to the Ukraine crisis, can help fill out the picture.
From that angle, we can start to understand Putin’s mix of tough-guy messages and almost wistful tone in describing relations with the world’s biggest economy.
Ultimately, for any world leader, the situation on the home front is what matters most. And, as Lukyanov notes, Russia “is beginning to understand that the efforts it deploys in foreign policy can no longer compensate for its economic and social weakness”.
— Worldcrunch, 2017/New York Times News Service
Marc Alves is a French-Portuguese writer.
