Rico's rants: Putin & Trump

Vanity Fair has an article by Peter Savodnik about Putin and Trump:

On Friday morning, Donald Trump will meet with Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, Germany. This should scare the bejesus out of everyone everywhere, including Russia. This will not end well. At best, it will end inconclusively, and nothing awful will happen. Nothing awful would be a happy ending.
The person whose job will be to ensure nothing awful happens is Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State. He is expected to be the only other American official in the room. According to Axios’s Jonathan Swan, there will be six people present: the presidents; Tillerson; Tillerson’s counterpart, Sergey Lavrov; and two translators. This, it should be noted, is a terrible idea that will make an already-terrifying meeting more terrifying. Lavrov is a superb diplomat who has faithfully executed Putin’s foreign policy since taking over the Foreign Ministry in 2004. Tillerson and, in fact, the whole American diplomatic corps, have been sidelined by Trump, who seems to trust only men in uniform, which is unsurprising and beyond stupid. Bottom line: the Russian team is united, sophisticated, clear-eyed. The Americans are fractured and unpredictable, but not in the clever way Trump’s minions like to think, but in a way that’s born of ignorance and mood swings.
What is the best-case scenario? In a parallel universe, one in which the American president had a rudimentary grasp of Russian history and statecraft and an appreciation for diplomacy, this would be a short meeting; five minutes tops. The President would state that he was fully aware of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, that he supported unequivocally all investigations into that meddling (including accusations that his campaign had colluded with the Russians), and that it would never happen again. He would explain that, if American intelligence got a whiff of any future meddling, it would use its own extensive cyber capabilities to expose the hidden bank accounts and investments of senior Kremlin officials, starting with the Russian president. (James Stavridis suggested, in a Foreign Policy column in October, that then-President Obama consider doing as much.) And he would make it clear that this would be the first step toward denying the Kremlin the status, legitimacy, and recognition it craves so deeply, that this would be the beginning of the end of pretending that Russia is a great power and not a kleptocracy that bleeds people, builds nothing, and stokes chaos abroad. Then, because this imaginary President would understand that it was important to give Putin something good to yap about, that he not alienate the Russian president, he would spend ten seconds saying something about joint US-Russian efforts to destroy ISIS, blah blah blah. Then, he would go.
Later, at a press briefing, Trump would expand on his comments to the Russian president that, not only would the United States regard an attack on its election system as a threat to our democracy, but it would also consider any Russian interference in the elections of any of our NATO allies an attack on the entire democratic enterprise. If the GRU, or Russian military intelligence, were to hack into, say, elections this fall in Norway or Germany, the United States would, obviously, invoke Article 5 of the NATO agreement and work with our allies to ensure a swift and proportional response. (To be fair, Trump, who was publicly castigated for not citing Article 5 in his May speech at NATO headquarters, did so in a speech on Thursday in Warsaw, Poland.)
Of course, this is not what will happen. This is the kind of response we might expect from a Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush or, maybe, just maybe, Hillary Clinton. But our current commander-in-chief can’t be bothered with ancient protocols. Instead of studying assiduously everything that John F. Kennedy did wrong when he met Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, Austria in 1961, this president, one expects, will just wing it. His national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, indicated on Wednesday that this is precisely what will happen. One wonders what we can expect to have surrendered by the time we wake up Friday morning. One wonders what the tweet will say: Just met with Putin! Great guy! Said some nice things about me! #FightingFakeNewsTogether.
The worst-case scenario probably involves returning Alaska in exchange for rights to develop a few golf courses on Lake Baikal. Presumably, Tillerson would put the kibosh on that. Alas, it will be much harder to guard against the rambling, barely coherent word porridge the American president vomits across the conference table, like a little tsunami washing away the miniature bottles of water and American and Russian flags.
The Russian president, who has reason to think big, will know exactly what he wants to get out of this meeting, and he will have thought through the best way to do that. He will have been briefed extensively on Trump’s personality, whims, foibles, outrages, excesses. He will know what Trump craves. What wounds him. What flatters him. What he wants. He will have probably watched a few episodes of The Apprentice, and he will know the tweets. In fact, one expects he will have memorized his favorites; the tweets that offend liberal pieties and members of Congress; the tweets, like winks or nods, that signal a shared belief system, and he will recite those back to the American president. Like Pushkin. He will tell him that if he were president of America he would fire Mika and Joe because she’s old (fifty!), and they will laugh together. Who wants old? Then he will flatter Melania, which will flatter Trump, who expects heads of state to lavish praise on his many properties, and the Russian president will lean close and say, we make them very nice here, yes? And Trump will nod and chuckle and think, You get me.
Then, the Russian president will pivot to business. It will not be the way men in suits do this in America. The demarcation between small and big talk in America is obvious. There is the inevitable clearing of the throat, the pause, the shift in tone. There is an above-boardness about things. And now we are going to talk about what we came here to talk about. The Russians, and this Russian especially, would never do that. Why would he? How dumb would that be? Better for Trump to believe the entire conversation is about his idiotic television show and his mindless online rants and the First Lady. Trump’s advisers may try to steer the conversation in a more formal direction. Turning to Syria . . . the Russian president will nod, say something sober and reassuring, and then make a joke about 'our Mexicans', i.e., Chechens, for the benefit of his new American friend, who will laugh heartily and then, one imagines, frown at the imbecile who just brought up dead children in Aleppo. Who cares about that? That’s so depressing! That’s not how you do business! I know business! You got to schmooze them! I’m schmoozing!
When Putin pivots to business it will not feel like a pivot. It will feel like a continuation of a conversation that Trump is enjoying a great deal. But the Russian president will know what he wants. He will know what is in his best interest. He will want Trump to convey his support for an expanded Russian role abroad, in the Middle East, in central Asia, anywhere but Afghanistan. He would love to make a deal, any deal, anything that communicates to our NATO allies, China, the South Koreans, the Israelis, the Saudis, that America will sleep with anyone these days. And he will want to commiserate with Trump about all the people they both hate: journalists, protesters, Islamic radicals. If one of the Americans brings up the election, he will swat it away, deny everything, make a face that says, How could you jeopardize all this for the sake of some “election” you already won? After the meeting, the Russian president will issue a statement expressing his hope for better relations with the United States, and he will say he looks forward to crushing ISIS together. ISIS is mostly a sideshow, and everyone but Trump knows it, and Putin will exploit that magnificently. Then, he will probably say something about North Korea, which will make Russia look more important than it is and build on the burgeoning rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing.
North Korea presents Russia with a lovely opportunity. It underscores the failure of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, now, Donald Trump to forge a serious strategy for maintaining long-term stability on the Korean peninsula. It exacerbates fissures between Trump, with his saber rattling, and the more dovish, new South Korean president. And it makes Russia, which has called on the United States to cancel its joint military exercises with South Korea, look eminently reasonable, even internationally minded, like the country it aspires to look like. Longer-term, one can imagine the United States being forced to reassess its support for sanctions and reluctantly coming around to China’s (and Russia’s) preferred approach: economic integration. Russia is already absorbing thousands of North Korean guest workers. Integration would mean even more super-cheap labor, and it would enhance Russian hegemony, if at America’s expense. Naturally.
Of course, this is not how the American president will see things. He will tell us he had a marvelous chat with Putin. He will tweet with his usual brio and ineptitude. He will think he is making America safer or richer or greater, and he will be wrong. He will have no idea what he is doing or what is being done to him, to us and he will never learn, because this is not a man who learns. He lurches. He proclaims. Anything that displeases him is “fake”. But the Russians will learn. They will fine-tune their approach. They will become even better at orchestrating Trump and his base. They will appear to be our friends, but they will not be, because they are unchanged. The only thing that has changed is our President, who knows not what he does.