Tillerson to miss first Nato meeting and will travel to Russia instead

The US president needs to accept that Putin has no interest in forging a better relationship with the West

AMERICA’S new secretary of state is to skip his first Nato meeting, it has been announced, and will instead greet the president of China and then travel to Russia.

The decision, likely to be celebrated in Moscow, has been greeted with surprise and anger from some in the US.

Eliot Engel, the senior Democrat on the house foreign affairs committee, said that Rex Tillerson was making a “grave error” by missing his first Brussels talks. “Donald Trump’s administration is making a grave error that will shake the confidence of America’s most important alliance and feed the concern that this administration is simply too cozy with Vladimir Putin,” he said.

“I cannot fathom why the administration would pursue this course except to signal a change in American foreign policy that draws our country away from Western democracy’s most important institutions and aligns the United States more closely with the autocratic regime in the Kremlin.” A former US official echoed the view. “It feeds this narrative that somehow the Trump administration is playing footsie with Russia,” he said. “You don’t want to do your early business with the world’s great autocrats. You want to start with the great democracies, and Nato is the security instrument of the transatlantic group of great democracies.”

Mr Tillerson’s presence at the April 5-6 meeting in Brussels had been eagerly anticipated, given Donald Trump’s criticism of Nato on the campaign trail. Mr Tillerson, it had been hoped, would deliver a strong message of support at his first Nato meeting. But instead, he will remain in the US to meet Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, when he visits Mr Trump in Florida. After the Chinese encounter, Mr Tillerson will travel to Moscow.

Tom Shannon, the acting undersecretary of state for political affairs, will represent the US at the Nato meeting.

Donald Trump says he hopes to build a constructive partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin. That hope looks certain to be one of the casualties of the FBI’s confirmation that it is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into Russian foul play in last year’s presidential contest.

Mr Trump made no secret of his admiration for the Russian leader on the campaign trail, describing Mr Putin a stronger leader than Barack Obama. He praised him for not responding when the outgoing president expelled a number of Russian “diplomats” from Washington over allegations they were involved in hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Mr Trump persisted with his pro-Putin stance after becoming president despite receiving a detailed intelligence briefing about the extent of the Kremlin’s cyberattacks on the election contest. In one of his nowfamiliar early morning tweets, the president declared: “Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Only “stupid” people, or fools, would think that is bad.”

Mr Trump is not alone in believing it is smart to pursue better relations with Moscow. Influential policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic – including a clutch of former British ambassadors to Moscow who should know better – argue that reaching out to Russia is the best way of resolving the tensions of the modern era.

The likelihood of this happening, though, looks increasingly remote now that the FBI has confirmed it is actively investigating Moscow’s attempts to influence the outcome of the presidential race, as well as allegations that members of Mr Trump’s campaign team had illegal dealings with Russian officials before he took office.

The FBI is not a novice when it comes to involving itself in American politics. The directorship of J. Edgar Hoover was defined by the agency’s paranoid obsession with foreign subversives seeking to subvert the political system, dating back to the 1940s when communist sympathisers were paraded before the Un-American Activities Committee.

Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were among a long list of presidential nominees to be subjected to intense scrutiny by Hoover’s G-men. More recently, Mrs Clinton was investigated for her careless use of her private email account to conduct public business.

The confirmation, though, by James Comey, the current FBI director, that he is investigating the Russians on a number of counts, has potentially far-reaching political implications. If it does produce evidence of Russian wrongdoing, it will bring down a key pillar of Mr Trump’s foreign policy.

Trump administration allies claim the FBI has got it all wrong, and argue that it was not in Moscow’s interests to undermine Mrs Clinton’s campaign as, if elected, she would have made a weak president, one who had no appetite for confronting the Kremlin. But it is just as easy to make the counter argument, that by supporting an anti-politician candidate like Mr Trump, the Russians have helped to undermine the effective operation of the American political system.

Either way, if the FBI does produce conclusive proof of Russian interference, then any rapprochement between Moscow and Washington will be doomed to failure.

That is assuming the Russians desire better relations in the first place which, given the way Mr Putin and his henchmen continue to conduct themselves, is very much an open question.

The deployment of the first British troops to Estonia this week as part of a Nato battle group is a direct response to Moscow’s bellicose stance towards the Baltics and eastern Europe. Nato is primarily a defensive alliance, and the fact that it feels obliged to deploy military hardware – which includes a significant contribution from the US – shows that Nato leaders view Mr Putin as a clear and credible threat to European security.

It is a similar picture in the Middle East, where the Russians are trying to build on their military success in Syria by broadening their ties throughout the region. The arrival of the first batch of Russian troops to Libya this month suggests Moscow is looking to consolidate its presence in a country that has all but been abandoned by the West.

For the reality is that, irrespective of the Trump administration’s wishful thinking that Mr Putin is seeking a more constructive relationship with the West, the Russian leader remains committed to his goal of restoring Russia to the superpower status it lost at the end of the Cold War. Not only does this place Mr Putin on a collision course with the West as it seeks to expand its influence, it means the Kremlin actively seeks the destruction of organisations such as Nato and the EU that act as a bulwark against further Russian encroachment.

In which case, Mr Trump might one day conclude that the FBI has done us all a great favour by destroying this doomed US-Russian reconciliation before it had a chance to get off the ground.