If Trump is the Churchill of our times he must confront Putin

DONALD TRUMP has a thing for Winston Churchill. One of Mr Trump’s first acts as president was to restore a Churchill bust to a prominent place in the Oval Office. By doing so, he was aligning himself with a longestablished Republican fixation with the World War II-era British leader. American conservatives have turned Churchill (inset) into a cult figure, whom they love to cite as an exemplar of principled resistance to tyranny.

Which, of course, he was.

Yet President Trump’s attempt to co-opt Churchill’s legacy is looking more perverse by the day. The United States is currently confronting a dictator who has seized territory from his neighbours by force, who is openly striving to undermine liberal democracy around the world, and who defies longestablished rules of international behaviour. Now

Russian President Vladimir Putin stands accused of authoring a brazen attack in Britain against one of his opponents. And Mr Trump’s response? It can be described only as appeasement. It is bad enough that Mr Trump had the gall to congratulate Mr Putin on his recent sham victory in the Russian presidential election. Now we learn Mr Trump used the same phone call to invite Mr Putin to Washington for a summit meeting, as has been confirmed by a Kremlin spokesman. It is worth pointing out that Mr Trump made the call to Mr Putin on March

20, 16 days after the former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were attacked with a nerve agent at their home in southern England. The poison used had the potential to sicken a large number of people but, evidently, the Russians had zero concerns about collateral damage. By the time Mr Trump made his generous overture to the Russian president, British Prime Minister Theresa May had already made clear that the trail of responsibility for the attack led straight to Mr Putin. The British

were well on their way to drumming up support among their allies for a series of retaliatory measures against the Kremlin, a campaign that has now resulted in the largest expulsion of undeclared Russian intelligence officials since the cold war. Twenty-nine countries have now taken part – including the United States, which moved to expel 60 Russian diplomats on March 26.

The charitable-minded might take this as evidence the president is seeing the error of ways, finally capitulating to the reality that Mr Putin is a foe of everything the United States holds dear. But Mr Trump has studiously avoided any public endorsement of his administration’s action against the Russians – merely the latest in a lengthy string of cases in which he has conspicuously avoided any criticism of Mr Putin.

NOW, to make matters worse, we have learned the US expulsions are not quite what they were made out to be. On March 29, Russian state television reported a US official had quietly given the Kremlin an exemption: the Russians are welcome to replace those 60 who were expelled whenever they wish, thus effectively transforming what was supposed to be a harsh deterrent into a minor inconvenience. “The doors are open,” the US official is reported to have said. (The British, by contrast, closed off this option, thus limiting the size of the Russian diplomatic delegation for the foreseeable future.) A reporter followed up with the State Department, which confirmed the report.

So will Mr Trump’s offer of a summit bear fruit? Perhaps not. But the mere fact he made it is already an appalling concession.

It bears repeating: Today’s Russia fits the very definition of an aggressive, revisionist power.

Four years ago, Russian forces invaded and annexed Crimea, which belongs to neighbouring Ukraine. This was the first time since World War II that a European power has seized territory by force. Moscow continues to wage an undeclared war against Ukraine, sponsoring breakaway territories in the eastern part of that country. (Russia is also behind several other “frozen conflicts” around the former Soviet Union, actively aiding separatists in countries where it wants to retain sway.) And Mr Putin is still using influence operations and cyber attacks to sow chaos in western democracies, often by supporting politicians and parties that aim to cause division and fear.

That the Kremlin continues to indulge in such behaviour clearly shows that it does not have any incentive to stop. And why should it? Like the ill-fated appeaser Neville Chamberlain, Mr Trump believes that the best response is to pander to the man who has shown that he has no interest in observing the current rules-based order. Any top-level “talks” with Mr Putin that do not begin, at minimum, with a Russian commitment to return Crimea to Ukrainian control, to observe the sovereignty of Russia’s neighbours, and to cease subversive activities in the West, will merely reward him for his transgressions.

Let’s be clear: Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler. The Russian president is not a genocidal maniac bent on conquering the world. Yet if Churchill taught us anything, it is that we cannot expect a troublemaking dictator to change his ways by encouraging his worst tendencies. Extending invitations and fudging punishments will get us nowhere. Deterrence is the only way forward. (© Washington Post)