Who is courting who in the Trump-Putin relationship? | American News

The invitation of Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to visit Washington violates diplomatic standards in that the guest has learned the offer via Twitter, obliging him to calibrate in time real diplomatic how to react.

after their first summit in Helsinki, it is the approval of the Russian president – a symbolic end to the ostracism he has suffered since the G8 Russia's ejection in 2014 This would also normalize relations between the United States and Russia, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, hailed.

For Putin's national audience, it would be confirmation that the US president sees him otherwise as a partner, at least as a competitor whom he can no longer ignore.

the talks are more formal than the exchanges in Helsinki, which would give Putin the opportunity to ensure that the bureaucracies on both sides begin to clarify certain details.

Restarting nuclear disarmament, holding a referendum in the eastern Donbbad region of Ukraine and protecting Israel's interests at the end of the Syrian civil war would be a huge gain for Russia. After all, it's not often that a US president says it's the US and not Russia that is responsible for slowing down their relationship. There is therefore an incentive for Russia to seize this unprecedented opportunity.

But Russian officials, such as the ambbadador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, seem really surprised by the negative reaction to the summit in the United States. Putin himself spoke of powerful forces seeking to undermine the summit.

The concern is not only the established Democratic opinion that Putin considers the president as an intelligence badet, but the principle hostility towards better relations emanating from the senior Republicans. ] A Reuters Ipsos Mori poll showed that 56% of Americans think that Putin interfered on behalf of Trump in the 2016 elections, even though only 32% of Republicans think the same thing. But the Republican base is slowly eroding, and many are moving anxiously at the sight of their president showing greater faith in Putin's word than the badysis of the US intelligence services.

Looking at these polls, most Republican candidates in November's mid-term elections would probably prefer not to have to defend Putin's wisdom visiting the White House in the previous weeks.

Putin may have secretly interfered in the 2016 elections to help Trump, but Moscow may calculate overt interference, through a highly charged visit in the fall, is unlikely to help Republicans to keep control of the Senate.

Trump, by doubling the Russian relationship, might have decided to risk defeat in November, but does Putin want to help him in this venture?

Putin could offer a more modest alternative such as a meeting at the UN General Assembly in New York in September or the G20 in Argentina in November, the kind of exchanges Barack was limiting to Obama.

If Putin took the risk of coming to the United States for a summit, it will not be his first visit since he ruled Russia, which the White House was highlighting this week.

In November 2001, George W. Bush immediately invited Putin to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for a two-day summit.

The two men failed to hear about a new missile treaty, even though their personal relationships thrived. They answered students' questions about women's rights in a school, the reduction of their nuclear arsenals and their sudden race to form a government in Afghanistan representing a representative sample of rebel tribes in the country, topics that could easily Trump and Putin repeated the exercise. But Putin was an unknown quantity at the time, a little more than a year after the beginning of power.

Bush and Putin met again in the United States in 2007 in Bush's compound at Walker's Point, Maine. They went fishing and discussed military defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. A year later, Putin invades Georgia largely indifferent to the American reaction

The difficulty is that after the summit in Helsinki last week, there are few signs, apart from the personal relationship of Trump -Putin, to justify a new alliance. In the days that followed, the Russian authorities spoke harshly about the conservation of eastern Ukraine, rejected a new body to investigate the attacks on the chemical weapon and stepped up the campaign military in Syria. In the United States, the hostility towards Putin is growing and it must be obvious to Moscow that Trump can not yet bring the American public or his party with him.

With Mueller's investigation into the United States and the UK's Sergei Skripal both to conclude, Moscow must recognize the odds of a new era in relationships are built on fragile foundations.