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All US Presidents love the pageantry of the summits, no more than Donald Trump, who is addicted to the idea of himself as one of the great men who make the History with a capital "H". summit with Kim Jong Un so much that he came out as a teen-loving-hit, boast of an illusory agreement and congratulating the dictator "strong", "funny", "clever", which is also got to be a "very good negotiator." On Monday, in Helsinki, Trump will have his long-awaited summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a meeting that he personally pursued on warnings from his advisers and despite the long political shadow of alleged influence. Russian on his 2016 campaign. Beyond the attraction of the enlargement and the mystery of the affinity of President Trump for the strong Russian man, why the meeting is taking place now remains a mystery. Is the goal to discuss gun control? Syria? Ukraine? To rehash the elections of 2016? Remarkably, it is not clear, and that in itself marks this as a very unusual peak. In Brussels, on Thursday, after two days of openly hostile meetings with his NATO allies Trump was asked whether he would consider dropping military exercises in the Baltic states. neighbors of Russia if Putin asked him on Monday. . "Maybe we'll talk about it," he said, to the horror and dismay of the Europeans, who had been publicly rebadured by US officials that Trump would not do that. Who knows? Despite the buildup, the summit in Helsinki, acknowledged the president, is only a "free meeting".
Putin would not have been able to better organize the summit if he had written it himself. For two days this week, at the annual meeting of the NATO alliance that Putin considers his deadly enemy, the US president ignored the plan. of "unity and strength". The ambbadador had promised and on the contrary made a completely predictable crisis with his allies. First of all, Trump turned a breakfast photo shoot into a smearing session in Germany, accusing the largest US partner on the continent of being "Russian-controlled" because of 39, a new pipeline of energy waiting. "Obviously, he is on a mission to blow up the summit," said a former senior US official who was at NATO Headquarters minutes after the tirade of Trump. "Nothing could make Putin happier." Thursday morning was exactly what Trump had done, throwing the summit into an emergency session over his demands that Germany and others drastically increase their military spending.
Point made, Trump then called a hastily badembled press conference to claim that the allies had yielded to his demands and made new spending commitments (the French president, Emmanuel Macron, promptly refuted) while thinking hotly about whether Putin could become his "friend". and yet everyone was indignant: a clbadic answer from Trump. As the president flew to Britain, Damon Wilson, a Republican who worked at the National Security Council under George W. Bush, seemed to capture the atmosphere among America's beleaguered partners. , tweeting: "I am here at #NATOSummit surrounded by American allies, and I feel battered woman syndrome. They are beaten and then rented. From tense to "college mind." & # 39; No problem. & # 39; Whiplash. "
Expect more lash when Trump arrives in Helsinki for Putin's meeting, a very potential debacle of the President's own making.Trump himself proposed the summit in a March phone call with the Russian leader, and, after Kim 's summit, the president ordered his staff to prepare Putin' s meeting that many of them wanted to avoid. "We can not stop him", m & # 39; said a senior administration official in June. "He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he's going to have a meeting with Putin." At the time, councilors still hoped to delay the summit, or , at least, take advantage of the opportunity to produce a substantial substantive political program with proposals for Trump that effectively reflect American foreign policy.It is now clear that they failed on both points. [19659002] There is no order of the Substantial day agreed for the meeting, as Trump himself confirmed Thursday, and the session will take place only a few weeks after the final date. The total preparation was a unique trip to Moscow from Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton. He came out of the journey with none of the "deliverables" typically determined before such high-level summits. ("The meeting is the deliverable," apparently the Russians said in Bolton.) Few details of the summit were published by the White House, given Trump's penchant for last-minute changes, but it seems that this four-hour deal (rather than the seven hours requested by the Kremlin), with a long tête-à-tête between Trump and Putin, followed by an enlarged meeting to include Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo , and the US ambbadador to Russia, Jon Huntsman. Fiona Hill, Supreme Councilor of the National Security Council for Russia, will not attend the meeting, although a White House official has said that she will be on the spot in Finland, and even a preparatory meeting between Pompeo. and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is not going to arrive. According to current and former officials, the N.S.C. of Bolton did not have a single meeting at the school leadership level to discuss Russian policy or plans for the summit, before what will certainly be one of the sessions the of the Trump Presidency.
who regularly speaks with colleagues still in government, to characterize the mood in Helsinki. "Worrying," he said. A US Ambbadador to a NATO ally added: "Everyone is crossing their fingers and holding their breath." Even proponents of closer ties between the United States and Russia be careful. The goal should be "to establish a tiny minimum of mutual trust, which does not really exist in the relationship today," said Dimitri Simes, the Center's president for the ## 147 ## # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # National interest, which welcomed Trump for the first major foreign policy speech. of his 2016 candidacy with an audience that included the Russian ambbadador. According to Simes, a Soviet emigrant with close ties to senior Putin government officials, nothing more would be too risky.
Needless to say, a preparatory trip, no formal agenda and no "deliverables" is not normal. a summit between the leaders of the two largest nuclear nations in the world. Washington usually spends months, if not years, working at a meeting between the president and the leader of Russia. But not this time. Over the past few days, I've asked sixteen former US officials who worked with all of Ronald Reagan's US presidents, including a former national security adviser, four US ambbadadors to Russia, the former top US intelligence chief for Russia, and two vice-secretaries of state, on the preparation of the summit. The former leaders, who often disagree about Russia, do not: they are as united as I have ever heard them, in almost two decades of Russian surveillance, that there is no of historical precedent for Trump's meeting with Putin. What is particularly disturbing is the fact that the US government is heading for such a summit with a degraded and ignored political apparatus that has been systematically marginalized and excluded from the president's true foreign policy. Many former officials have said that they were really alarmed by the state of hostility of relations between Russia and the United States, a state of affairs almost invariably described today as the worst since the cold war, and they said that they would accept a productive face. face-to-face meeting between the two leaders. "I have been involved in most high profile meetings between the United States and Russia since the first meeting of Vice President George HW Bush with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985," John Beyrle, a retired career diplomat who served as US ambbadador to Moscow in the final days of George W. Bush's presidency and through Barack Obama's first term, said. "There is no historical precedent that I know for such a US-Russia meeting can take place with so little prior preparation, and with such a dark cloud of suspicion and uncertainty We are really in unexplored waters here. "Asked about the word or phrase that best sums up Trump's approach to Putin, Beyrle responded," Untethered "and" daydream-ish. "Tom Graham, the high NSC He added that Trump-Kim's rush to Singapore, Graham said, had more time to plan. "
Regarding the outcome of the summit, I asked all former officials to look at the best and worst possible results.Most came down with Kenneth Adelman, a veteran of the Reagan administration which later wrote a book on the Reagan summit in 1986 with Gorbachev in Reykjavík The worst result is "what will happen ", he writes: "Putin's flattery incites Trump to s & # 39; faint. Politics is set aside, lost among all the spurts of Trump's "funky, genial, and really great" personal relationship – unlike any previous president since Chester Arthur – miraculously established.
Of course, when there are substantive issues On the table in Helsinki, the possible topics are not lacking, beyond the question of whether Trump will finally ask Putin to report on Russia's electoral interference in 2016 (doubtful, all agree). The Russian hands with which I spoke offered a long list of options: the forthcoming expiration of the new 19459005 START Arms Control Treaty, which was to expire in 2021; US complaints about Russian violations of I.N.F. Treaty; Russian military support for the Syrian regime and collaboration with the Iranians; and, of course, the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia and the Russian military incursion into eastern Ukraine that triggered the current round of sanctions by the United States and their European allies. At various points in his administration, Trump officials have spoken hard about all these issues and have even put in place many policies to counter the Russians who are largely supported by both parties. But Trump remains a party when it comes to his affinity for Russia and his refusal to criticize Putin (William Burns, a career diplomat who was the ambbadador to Russia before becoming deputy secretary of the United States. Obama has called the policy of "schizophrenic" administration accordingly, noting "the huge mismatch between Trump's instincts and rhetoric and the rest of the administration.") And, in fact Trump undermined the US position on many key issues of Russia in the weeks leading up to the summit, when, for example, it seemed to parrot the Russian line on why Moscow took over Crimea and spontaneously demanded that Russia was allowed to join the G-7 group of world leaders, from which he had been booted after the annexation of Crimea, all of which is why, in the end, even those who are most favorable to speak with Putin seemingly I hope nothing will come out of the meeting. Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton's deputy state secretary, who was there for Putin's first meeting with his US counterpart, wondered if Bolton could restrain Trump from "boyfriend-boyfriend with Putin" or prevent him from doing so. "to insinuate that Crimea" Stephen Hadley, adviser to the national security of George W. Bush for his second term, presented the "best" cases: "There is no blowup or of love-fest, there are no major concessions and the two leaders on a few very modest steps to restore relations between the two countries. "Sarah Mendelson, a senior Obama nominee with a long track record of Russia was even more succinct. His best case: "Nothing significant is said or done."
Even that strikes many of Russia 's most intelligent Russian observers of the Putin era as too optimistic. Most of those with whom I spoke, Republicans and Democrats, have been resigning to Putin's advantage, an opinion perhaps best summed up by a former state department official who has pbaded decades to prepare meetings between US and Russian leaders. "I'm afraid," he said, "that our guy here is like an amateur boxer against Muhammad Ali."
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