What the commentators said
What exactly does Trump see in Putin, asked Kim Sengupta in The Independent. Since taking office, he has “insulted and attacked” people around the world – but never Putin. In fact, he has praised the Russian leader no fewer than 11 times. That “fanboy behaviour” could be down to blackmail, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. Maybe Putin has insider knowledge of Trump’s past plans to build a skyscraper in Moscow; or of alleged sexual shenanigans on a visit to Russia (remember the dossier of lurid allegations compiled by a former British spy?); or of his actual collusion in the election meddling. Whatever the truth, Trump has given Russia’s president a boost at a time he badly needed it, said Elena Chernenko in The New York Times: Putin’s ratings have recently been hit hard by the Kremlin’s deeply unpopular proposal to raise the pension age. Now, buoyed also by the success of the World Cup, he can sell himself as the successful champion of a “superpower that deserves to be taken seriously”.
If Trump is really in Putin’s thrall, he has a strange way of showing it, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. This is a president who has raised defence spending, fired missiles at Russia’s Syrian ally and sold arms to Ukraine, a would-be Nato member. Rather than one president being in thrall to the other, the two seem united by a “philosophical” bond, a disdain for what conservatives see as the “suicidal liberalism” of the West. Not that Trump’s approach to Russia is really so different from that of his Democrat predecessor, said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. Both have displayed a willingness to “flout” public opinion by making concessions to Russia; both have expressed contempt for Washington’s foreign policy establishment (“the blob”); both have accepted a Russian presence in Syria. But as Obama discovered, US presidents struggle to bring about “diplomatic revolutions” in the face of congressional hostility. “It remains to be seen how quickly Mr Trump will grasp this important truth.”