Even before his election, Republican candidate Donald Trump mustered un-American courage to praise the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, labelling him a “strong leader”. He expressed his desire to build closer ties with Moscow and even pondered whether Nato was not obsolete and needed to be eliminated — just like the Warsaw Treaty Pact was — or, at least, become a “pay-as-you-go institution”.
Remarkably, Trump and Putin joined hands as they vilified the Democratic Party presidential candidate as a malicious warmonger, which allegedly elevated the American’s foreign policy expertise in the humble estimation of the Russian. Several months later, senior American officials were still looking into allegations that Moscow may well have interfered in the United States presidential election last month, although Trump dismissed the accusations, as has General Michael Flynn, US president-elect Trump’s designated national security adviser who was the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency two years ago.
For now, this is what is on the table: Trump believes that Putin is a “better leader” than US President Barack Obama, the man he is slated to succeed, while Putin reciprocates this adulation when he opines that the real-estate mogul “is a clever man [who] will quickly understand his new responsibilities”.
Both men hope to improve US-Russia relations with the wily — and much smarter — Putin showering the businessman with false acclaim. A few days ago, Putin told a Russian television show that Trump’s business successes “suggest that he is a clever man. And if (he is) a clever man, then he will fully and quite quickly understand another level of responsibility” without specifying what that could be.
Of course, it is too early to determine whether Trump, who is out of his depth when it comes to preparation, will either improve or set back ties between the two countries. As David Remnick of the New Yorker wrote last August, Trump was “academically uninterested, ... disruptive in class ... and shipped off to military school when he was 13” to learn how to be useful. By his own admission, the president-elect stated: “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” ... “The temperament is not that different,” he concluded, which will truly complicate American-Russian relations in the next phase because so much more than core temperament is at stake with a figure like Putin.
In fact, a few days ago, the US House of Representatives passed (390 to 30) a new intelligence policy bill that targeted Russia, calling for the establishment of a high-level panel to counter Russian attempts to “exert covert influence” in the US and in several Nato countries because, and this is worth repeating, Moscow pursues a policy of systematic interference in the internal affairs of western powers.
The bill says the committee will work on “countering active measures by Russia to exert covert influence, including exposing falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism and assassinations carried out by the security services or political elites of the Russian Federation or their proxies”. Another provision of the bill restricts Russian diplomatic personnel in the US to travel no more than 25 miles (40km) from their official posts unless the FBI informs Congress that the officials have been cleared of any evidence of wrongdoing. It behoves one to remember that the House of Representatives is a Republican-led institution and will remain so in the next Congress, which means that Trump will have to fight his own men and fast to forge a different relationship with Putin.
Parenthetically, Trump will not pay too much attention to demands by the Senate Intelligence Committee to look into, and declassify if possible, sources that confirm how “the Russian government influenced the 2016 US presidential elections”, especially the alleged hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s networks in October 2016. Still, and according to the National Security Agency Director, Admiral Michael Rogers, the hacking “was a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect” that, to put it mildly, is a political earthquake. Trump rejected this conclusion of the US intelligence community, but time will tell whether he will devote the necessary energy to listen to the men and women who are in the know.
The bill and calls for declassification of intelligence materials come as the incoming administration and Moscow seek to lower tensions, with the Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Mikhail Bogdanov asserting that he has been in touch with the Trump team who apparently “are different people whom we have known for a long time already”. Putin himself said that he had recently spoken to Trump and their “opinions coincided” over how tensions between Washington and Moscow could be straightened out.
Although laudatory, this course is treacherous because Moscow aims to weaken the US and restore multi-polarity. Russian leaders sincerely believe that American attempts after the end of the Cold War in 1990 — to create a unipolar world — have failed and that the time is ripe to restore an updated multipolar system. In fact, Putin has spoken about the principles of international law, though what he aims for is a reassertion of Russian power throughout the world, to “Make Russia Great Again”. We will see whether Trump’s “Make America Great Again” will clash with that goal, or whether the motto will apply to both countries, especially since Pentagon leaders, including incoming secretary of defence James Mattis, perceive Russia as Washington’s biggest military rival and the only true existential threat facing the country.
Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the just-published From Alliance to Union: Challenges Facing Gulf Cooperation Council States in the Twenty-First Century (Sussex: 2016).