VLADIMIR PUTIN CANNOT BEGIN TO BELIEVE HIS LUCK.
In the old days of the Soviet empire, Moscow-watchers might have spent weeks analyzing the look on Vladimir Putin’s face during his meeting in Helsinki with the U.S. president.
What, precisely, was behind the enormous grin the Russian leader wore during their joint appearance? Glee? Disbelief ? Self-satisfaction? An uncontainable sense of utter hilarity?
It’s possible Putin just couldn’t believe his luck. From the rubble that was Russia in the wake of the Soviet collapse and the disarray of the following decade, he has managed somehow to keep the country relevant enough that he could be accorded a summit with the leader of the country that still clings tentatively to the title of world’s greatest power. Not only had he just spent two hours conferring privately with Donald Trump, but here was Trump, in public, showing himself to be just as hapless an adversary as Moscow could hope for in its wildest dreams. If you’re Putin, you must have spent at least some time in recent months wondering whether the current White House resident could really be as vain, credulous and grotesquely ignorant as he appeared. Was it possible that, somewhere beneath that monstrous, debilitating ego, there was a calculated, cunning plan in the works that even the Kremlin’s most cynical minds had somehow missed?
Nope. Trump proved once again, for all the world to see, that he’s a man of mammoth delusions and crippling self-regard. A gift to a leader like Putin, who made a career for himself as a Soviet intelligence officer, learning to recognize and exploit human weakness to the full. For someone with Putin’s skills, manipulating a man like Trump must seem too easy by half, a task totally lacking in challenge due to the president’s glaring faultlines. If Putin were still a KGB operative, he’d probably consign the file to an underling at this point, secure in the knowledge there was no longer much to worry about as far as Washington was concerned.
You don’t have to like, admire or respect Putin to recognize how skilfully he’s handled the shambles he found when he first took office 18 years ago. He has now outmanoeuvred and outsmarted three successive U.S. presidents, so successfully that he must wonder at times how the U.S. ever managed to attain the commanding position it held for so much of the past century. George W. Bush “looked the man in the eye,” and totally misjudged what he found there. Barack Obama never understood that the rhetoric and intellectualizing that had worked for him at home would get nowhere in Moscow. And Trump has proved to be a godsend.
It’s been said that Russia’s oil is all that keeps it from becoming a failed state, yet despite manifold deficiencies it has managed to seize and retain a position on the world stage that forces other countries to take notice and pay court. It’s noteworthy that amid the avalanche of outrage that greeted the summit, one country pronounced itself entirely satisfied with the outcome. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his gratitude for “the abiding commitment of the U.S. … to the security of Israel,” while also commending “the security co-ordination between Israel and Russia and the clear position expressed by President Putin regarding the need to uphold the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement between Israel and Syria.”
Netanyahu worked hard to ensure that result, visiting Putin in Moscow in the days before Helsinki to press Israel’s concerns over Syria and Iran’s activities there. Significantly, Israeli jets were able to carry out a reported air strike in Syria in June, intended to disrupt Iranian weapons activities, without any sign of opposition from Moscow. While Washington has fiddled and faddled over Syria and what to do about it, Netanyahu knows where Israeli interests lie and what is needed to protect them.
He’s a rarity among the leaders with whom Putin has found himself dealing. The Russian president has managed to undermine European strength and unity by exploiting its dependence on Russian energy, to the point that Trump could assert Germany, Europe’s strongest power, is “totally controlled by Russia,” while Chancellor Angela Merkel struggles to avoid her government’s collapse. Unquestionably, Moscow has become the dominant power in Syria, ensuring President Bashar Assad’s survival despite much sabre-rattling from Washington and an onslaught of empty warnings from the Obama administration. Russia now boasts a position of influence throughout the region it never before enjoyed.
None of Putin’s aggressive military manoeuvres has been successfully resisted — in Georgia, Ukraine, the Crimea or Syria — and Moscow continues to disconcert Baltic states with little more than regular reminders of what lies just across their borders. Subtlety is not a Putin trait: just after leaders from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia visited Trump at the White House in April, Russian forces staged three days of missile tests just outside NATO waters in the Baltic Sea. The NATO alliance itself has been thrown into confusion by a combination of Putin’s tactics and Washington’s erraticism. It is entirely to Russia’s advantage that the Trump administration puts so much effort into battling its allies, leaving them confused and uncertain as to the extent of its support.
A stronger, smarter or more engaged president might have presented a greater challenge to Putin’s intrigues. Nikita Khrushchev thought the young, untested John F. Kennedy could be bulldozed, but learned otherwise during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ronald Reagan lacked Gorbachev’s intellectual gifts but understood his teetering empire needed only a final shove to implode. Putin has had to contend with nothing like the leadership qualities they possessed. The more he pushes, the more the U.S. has given way, leaving itself and its allies exposed, a drifting power with no one at the wheel.
No wonder Putin looked so happy. Contemptuous of democracy, he must feel that when people are free to choose, any fool can get elected. And there was the evidence, standing right beside him, for all the world to see.
THE MORE HE PUSHES, THE MORE THE U.S. HAS GIVEN WAY.