Since early in his campaign, President Donald Trump has made counter-terrorism cooperation a pillar of his argument for improving relations with Russia. On the face of it, that idea might seem attractive: two of the world’s largest militaries and intelligence communities working together against Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and other extremist networks to achieve progress that neither could alone.

But it’s a bad idea. A partnership with Russia of the kind Trump proposes has the potential to profoundly undermine the United States’ counterterrorism progress and shred our relationships with Muslim countries around the world. Moreover, it’s doubtful such an alliance could actually be forged.

Trump suggested in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal that counterterrorism cooperation would be reason enough to lift the sanctions the Obama administration has levied for Russian interference in the presidential election. As he put it, “If you get along and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?”

Russian counterterrorism has never been about doing “really great things.” It has been principally about indiscriminate violence — targeting a few terrorists and recklessly slaughtering civilians in the hope that no one will dare continue to plot attacks. If you’re not sentimental about human rights, that may have some effect on a limited, confined population. But it’s the opposite of US counterterrorism, which aims to remove dangerous terrorists while causing as few civilian deaths as possible.

Our approach is grounded not only in the recognition that killing civilians is wrong but also in the understanding that indiscriminate violence encourages radicalisation. We do everything we can to limit deaths in counterterrorism strikes, both to minimise the effects of those in the immediate area and to deprive those streaming propaganda videos on their computers thousands of miles away of fodder for outrage.

It’s often said that the United States practises counterterrorism with a scalpel while Russia uses a chainsaw. That has been made clear in Syria, where Airwars, a London-based monitoring group, estimates that Russian air strikes cause civilian deaths at a rate eight times that of US-led coalition missions. While Trump was pilloried during the campaign for suggesting that the US murder the families of terrorists, that has long been standard practice in Russia, along with “disappearing” and extrajudicially killing suspects. Consequently, the Muslim-majority Russian republics of Dagestan and Chechnya still smoulder after decades of rebellion and oppression; other Russian Muslim communities seethe.

The experience in the Caucasus and the rest of Russia underscores the dangers of Moscow’s approach. President Vladimir Putin’s tactics have led to terrorist violence at home and the export of thousands of terrorists to Syria, where they make up one of the largest cohorts of foreign extremists. Russian citizens have also been a major presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world. A Chechen-led cell is believed to be responsible for killing 45 people in an attack on Istanbul’s airport in June. Numerous smaller attacks against Russians at home have been carried out and terrorist calls for violence against Russia have been escalating worldwide.

Trump, it seems, is oblivious to these trends.

Embracing Russia and its brutal tactics has the potential to stoke anti-American sentiment and encourage radicalisation.

Joining forces with Russia in Syria would also damage US relations with governments in the Middle East. These governments rightly consider Russia the patron of President Bashar Al Assad of Syria, the ally of Iran and de facto partner of Hezbollah — all of whom are seen as responsible for the butchery in Syria. They also understand, as Trump does not, that Russia’s military engagement in Syria has been aimed at helping the Al Assad government survive, not targeting the Daesh.

For now, Arab governments from Cairo to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, are exuberant about Trump’s victory. Those high spirits will quickly fade if the United States is seen to be abetting the Damascus-Tehran-Moscow axis. This, in turn, will impede the work of the United States’ fight against terrorism. The US relies on Arab countries for much of the most valuable intelligence on terrorists. By contrast, we receive little of value from Russia.

That points to the final reason such a partnership with Moscow is a terrible idea. The United States has laboured to improve its counterterrorism cooperation with Russia since the attacks of September 11. As coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, I, like my counterparts in other agencies, sought to engage the Russians on many occasions. Though we pointed to the counterterrorism work as a modestly successful part of an otherwise volatile relationship, in truth there was little to boast about.

In areas where we should have been able to cooperate, like transportation security, safeguarding special events like the Olympics and countering terrorist propaganda, Russia’s sclerotic bureaucracy and general lack of interest (especially with issues like deradicalisation) made progress impossible. In more sensitive areas, like intelligence cooperation, some information routinely changes hands. But there is profound mistrust on both sides.

Russian and US intelligence agencies see one another not so much as potential allies but as persistent threats. In the wake of Russia’s meddling in the presidential election, it is utterly — and rightly — inconceivable that the US intelligence community would change its position. Trump might ponder that.

— New York Times News Service

Daniel Benjamin served as the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism from 2009-12. He is director of the John Sloan Dickey Centre for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.