I've no useful thoughts about what to do regarding Ukraine and Russia (as of this moment it looks like the Russian attack has started). It's a terrible situation but as to how to respond I'm not sure. While I've long been in favor of the U.S. and our European allies stating that Ukraine will not be offered membership in NATO, Putin's recent statements make clear what was already obvious to anyone paying attention over the past decade, NATO was never really the issue; Putin views Ukraine as an illegitimate state that should rightfully be part of Russia and NATO's actions merely provided a handy argument for mobilizing Russian public opinion.
Like Russia, Ukraine is an incredibly corrupt state where the prospect of lucrative contracts drawn in and entangled a long series of Republican and Democratic consultants in its scandals (see, for instance, Paul Manafort and Hunter Biden). It's a mess. Putin's actions are outrageous but we and the Europeans are not going to go to war over it. Ideally, the European countries would get serious in investing in their own defense (some Eastern Europeans countries like Poland are already doing so but, then again, the EU bureaucrats hate Poland) and be prepared for the future, while we concentrate on China, but I have serious doubts that scenario will happen. This is no longer the unipolar world of the 1990s. We can't be, and should not be, everywhere - even in the unipolar world we overestimated our ability to impact others; today our capabilities are much more constrained. The world has changed, and so have we. If we don't care about our own borders, why should we care about other borders?
What I do want to spend some time on is addressing the reemergence of the predictable media narrative about Donald Trump versus his predecessor and successor. Some examples:
This column from Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post titled, "With Biden Standing Firm, Putin Must Wonder: Where's Trump When I Need Him?"
And this gem from John Harwood:
as a top WH nat-sec aide, Fiona Hill watched President Trump weaken NATO, squeeze Ukraine, cozy up to Putin
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) February 20, 2022
from outside govt, she has advised President Biden as he leads NATO to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression
"couldn't get a sharper contrast"https://t.co/v9rUb717R9
A recurring theme on my posts regarding Trump is the disconnect between his rhetoric and his actions. Disconnects in political rhetoric are not uncommon, but it is the nature of Trump's disconnect that contributed to his Russia problem and his larger political shortcomings. As is often the case with Trump, he is his own worst enemy, providing his opponents with their best ammunition. His reckless, careless and off the cuff patterns of speech are, I think, reflective of his actual thoughts, but since those thoughts are chaotic, unstructured, improvised, and impulsive, it's just part of the whole package of Trump.
In the case of Russia, Trump made repeated terrible statements during the campaign of 2016, including expressing moral equivalency between Russia and the U.S., statements that if made by President Obama would have sparked outrage by Trump supporters. Unfortunately, it didn't end with the campaign; in 2017 he made embarrassing comments to the Russian Ambassador about firing Comey to help his relationship with Russia, in 2018 his disastrous remarks at the Helsinki Summit with Putin prompted me to write that Trump acts like a star-struck teenage girl around Putin, and, in 2019, getting on the phone to Vlad to gloat over the collapse of the Mueller Report. Trump's own statements are why I gave initial credence to the possibility of the Russia collusion allegations being true.
Trump's pattern followed in many other areas, making it easier to, for instance, accuse him of authoritarianism. It deserves mentioning that Trump's intuitive instincts are what enabled him to survive much of this. On many issues he had the ability to be able to express sentiments broadly reflective of public opinion on issues like immigration and foreign policy though he was unable to formulate or implement solutions on a sustained basis. As I learned in my business career, there is an enormous difference between expressing generalized goals or actions and actually having a plan to carry it out. In 2018 or 2019 I saw Tucker Carlson interviewed on C-Span (I've never seen his Fox show having not watched any cable or network news show in at least a decade) who captured it best - he praised Trump's ability to raise questions on important issues that conventional D and R avoided confronting directly, but pointed out Trump was not capable of solving those issues because of his disinterest in the details of government, ignorance, and laziness. But, at least he had the instincts; his unscripted talk was often a word salad but one from which, if you read a transcript, you could extract the underlying meaning. In contrast, Kamala Harris also produces word salads, but they are empty of underlying meaning so have no nutritional value.
And, as we saw repeatedly, the problem was not just Trump's rhetoric when it came to Russia; it was the also the opposition's strategy of inventing stories to meet the needs of its narrative. One of the stories that emerged during the 2016 campaign was Trump's supposed intervention during the GOP convention to weaken the proposed platform statement on Ukraine because of his sympathy for Russia, a story that got wide play in the press. I took it to be true because it was consistent with Trump's statements at the time. When the Steele Dossier became public in early 2017 it contained an allegation that Paul Manafort, working with the Russians, had influenced the GOP platform on Ukraine via his contact Carter Page who had directly effected the change at the convention.
The truth, when it finally emerged with the release of the four FISA warrant applications on Page and the report of the Department of Justice Inspector General on said warrants, was quite different. The Steele Dossier allegations regarding the platform were included as justification for the warrant and these allegations were certified as being reliable and accurate by a number of senior FBI and DOJ officials, including James Comey. The warrant applications referenced as supporting material the news media stories about the weakening of the GOP platform.
However, as the IG report revealed, the FBI was never able to corroborate the platform allegations (indeed there is no evidence Page ever met Manafort or that he had any involvement in the platform), and that the news stories about it were planted by the Clinton campaign, based upon the Steele Dossier which it had paid for, so the FBI used media stories based on the Dossier to validate the accuracy of the Dossier!
Because its remit did not extend to examining the underlying truth of the assertion that the GOP platform had been weakened, regardless of how it occurred, the IG report went no further. However, I did, as reported in The DC Bubble & The FBI, looking at both the details of how the GOP platform on Ukraine was changed and comparing it with the 2016 Democratic party platform. It turns out the original GOP platform was stronger than the Democratic platform and the changes strengthened it further. The entire story was a lie, propagated by the Clinton campaign and its media allies.
The Actions
Let's look at what the Trump administration actually did starting with an excerpt from my 2018 post on the Helsinki summit:
Last year Walter Russell Mead, writing in The American Interest, had an interesting take on Trump's policy towards Russia. Mead is a mainstream foreign policy expert, who seems to be an old-style liberal. I have no idea who he supported in the 2016 election. Mead pointed out:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
- Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
- Blocking oil and gas pipelines
- Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
- Cutting U.S. military spending
- Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran
He then goes on to note that while these were President Obama's actual policies, Trump was doing the opposite in each area.
You'll note that the Biden Administration has renewed the Obama policies as to four of the five items listed above (the exception is military spending). In the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference with American elections released in January 2017, the appendix includes an explicit finding that the Kremlin supported the anti-fracking movement in the U.S. for the purposes of damaging energy development in this country.
And what else was the administration up to? As I noted in that 2018 post:
. . . the United States has just entered into an unprecedented joint security arrangement with Sweden and Finland designed to address the Russian threat. The President just caused a storm of controversy by accusing Germany of becoming too economically dependent upon Russian natural gas and has been demanding our NATO allies increase defense spending.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, a Trump appointee, gave a speech at the Hudson Institute in which he said cyberthreats were our #1 security risk, and that the threat came from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, calling Russia as "no question . . . the most aggressive".
Here are some other actions during the Trump administration:
In 2017 authorized the sale of anti-tank weapons to the Ukraine, which the Obama administration declined to do. This news article describes the action as "likely to become another sore point between Washington and Moscow".
Strongly supported the Three Seas Initiative by twelve EU nations in Eastern Europe to cooperate on infrastructure initiatives, designed in part to reduce dependence on Russian energy resources, including building liquefied natural gas terminals in Poland and Croatia.
Withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty because of Russian refusal to address its continued violation of the treaty.
Opposing the Nordstream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany.
On July 6, 2017, President Trump gave a speech in Warsaw, where the Polish government is strongly anti-Russian. Excerpts:
We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes — including Syria and Iran — and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.
Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are. If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.
To those who would criticize our tough stance, I would point out that the United States has demonstrated not merely with words but with its actions that we stand firmly behind Article 5, the mutual defense commitment.
Words are easy, but actions are what matters. And for its own protection — and you know this, everybody knows this, everybody has to know this — Europe must do more. Europe must demonstrate that it believes in its future by investing its money to secure that future.
That is why we applaud Poland for its decision to move forward this week on acquiring from the United States the battle-tested Patriot air and missile defense system -- the best anywhere in the world. (Applause.) That is also why we salute the Polish people for being one of the NATO countries that has actually achieved the benchmark for investment in our common defense.
Trump's reference to "our tough stance" is with regards to his insistent that NATO nations live up to their treaty commitments regarding defense spending, which they had failed to do, instead relying on continued American military support. Thanks to Trump's tough stance, many of the NATO countries have increased defense spending.
To what extent can all these actions be directly attributable to Trump? Did he ever have an overall strategic plan on relations with Russia? How much occurred without his knowledge? How much took place where he "knew" but did not understand? I have no idea, but it did occur during his administration. At the same time action cannot be completely separated from rhetoric. Trump bears responsibility for both. That his rhetoric undercut his actions and the perception of those actions is Trump's fault.
There is another element that may have influenced Putin's relatively restrained behavior during the Trump administration and which is directly attributable to Donald Trump - his unpredictability, however "nice" his rhetoric may have been towards Putin.
In December 2016 I attended a talk at Yale by Gleb Pavlovskiy, a supporter of Putin who had worked with him until 2011, when he became an opponent of the regime. In the course of his talk he was asked about the prospects of American-Russian relations with the newly elected president:
His views on Trump were mixed. He started off by saying:
"For the first time Russia has received a worthy partner - almost as unpredictable as we are"Later, he referred to Putin now having "a strong sparring partner". He felt the way Trump had wrong-footed his opponents along the way to victory was very much like Putin's style; splitting your opponents but keeping together your supporters. On the one hand, with Trump in office there was an opportunity for "a new strategic dialogue" and "reduction in tensions", but on the other, the very unpredictability of Putin and Trump made it difficult to forecast any specifics. He did emphasize the Trump is playing a much stronger hand than Putin. Overall, I took from the discussion that he thinks Trump may be as big an improviser as Putin.
There are two specific instances of Trump unpredictably which may have given Putin pause. The first was in February 2018 when a large force of Russian mercenaries and allies were spotted heading towards U.S. military positions in Syria. After failing to heed warnings to halt, our forces attacked, killing 90 Russian citizens and about a hundred of their allies, with the Americans incurring no casualties.
The second occurred on January 3, 2020 when Trump ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, following an attack on the American embassy in Baghdad by Iranian backed militia. It was widely reported that presented with a set of response options, Trump picked the most extreme one - killing Soleimani. The reporting also stated that those presenting the options did not expect Trump to select that option. And despite widespread media predictions, the action led to no large scale response by Iran.
In summary, while it is possible to confuse correlation with causation let's set forth the basic chronology of Putin's foreign adventures:
2008 (Bush) - Invasion of Georgia
2014 (Obama) - Invasion of Crimea, intervention in Donbass region of Ukraine
2015 (Obama) - Intervention in Syria
2022 (Biden) - Ukraine Crisis
Before And After
I've written of the Obama administration interaction with Russia here.
As for Biden, he has followed the opposite course of Trump; very tough rhetorically, much softer actions.
Announced we would extend the INF despite Putin's failure to address violations.
Refused, until recently, to continue providing lethal military aid to the Ukraine.
Labeling Poland a "rising totalitarian" regime, grouping it with a real totalitarian regime, Putin's ally, Belarus.
Refused to impose sanctions regarding Nordstream 2, going so far as to support Senate Democrats in using what the Democrats had been telling us was the "Jim Crow" filibuster to stop a GOP sponsored resolution.
Curtailing American energy development.
Negotiating a renewed nuclear deal with Russia's ally, Iran. For my critique of the original deal go here (I've actually read the JCPOA, unlike most commentators).
I can't resist adding that during the Obama administration, Joe Biden was the point man on American support for Russia's successful application to join the WTO.Like I said at the start, I have no idea of the best course of action regarding Ukraine. However, the criticism of Trump reveals people in the media and elsewhere who just repeat the same lines to each other over and over again and then believe them, nodding knowingly to each other, because that is all they hear. For more on how this works read Inventing Stories.
I don't want Trump back as president and will oppose him, but the reality is the opposition has nothing better on offer. The vapidity of the Washington crowd is remarkable. The failure to ever re-examine their basic assumptions is appalling. Does anyone really have confidence in Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Wendy Sullivan when it comes to foreign policy, when all they can do is just keep repeating the conventional wisdom as if it were a chant?
In all his shallowness, Donald Trump revealed the hollowness of the Washington crowd in both parties. The reality is there are no adults in the room at this point, whether D or R, even as they point fingers at each other about what is unfolding.
UPDATE: As of last night, debates over the relative responsibilities of American presidents since 1991, European actions, and Putin motivations are now just a matter for historians. The question now is what is to be done given the circumstances we face now?
The choices we and others now face, along with others I anticipate coming over the next few years, will require decisions with full acknowledgement that the consequences cannot be predicted as discussed in Mastering the Tides of the World.
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