Trump faces powerful, clever adversary in Putin
Russian president has long history as forceful negotiator
Relations between Russia and Georgia were strained in 2011 when then-Vice President Joe Biden’s motorcade rolled past Ferrari and Maserati dealerships to Vladimir Putin’s private dacha for their first meeting in a ritzy neighborhood outside Moscow.
Biden had laid the groundwork to ease tensions and made the case to Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, that Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili was not seeking to provoke the Kremlin.
“I just spoke to him,” Biden declared across a large conference table.
Putin was unmoved. “We know exactly what you’re saying to Saakashvili on the phone,” he shot back. Biden laughed, but Putin didn’t, according to a former U.S. official who recounted the exchange, which has not been previously revealed publicly. The U.S. delegation took him at his word that Russian agents were wiretapping their calls.
As President Donald Trump prepares for his first meeting this week with Putin in Hamburg, Germany, those who have negotiated with him caution that Trump must be ready for a shrewd, well-prepared and implacable adversary.
Putin, who reclaimed the presidency in 2012, has served as president during the terms of three U.S. presidents, shifting his persona but never his demands in countless phone calls and summit meetings, according to interviews with former aides with firsthand knowledge of the conversations. Bill Clinton shared a dinner of spicy wild boar with him at the presidential palace. George W. Bush looked in his eyes to get “a sense of his soul.” Barack Obama pursued a “reset” of a troubled relationship.
But all three failed to forge a personal bond with Putin as bilateral relations tumbled into an ever-worsening state of affairs.
Enter Trump, who professed admiration for Putin during his campaign, calling him a stronger leader than Obama. But their summit has been tainted by an FBI investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives who allegedly meddled in the U.S. election to aid Trump.
White House officials have said there is no formal agenda, and they were noncommittal about whether the president intends to raise the election issue with Putin.
The meeting will be watched closely for the tone Trump that takes with Putin. Jon Finer, who served as an aide to Biden and as chief of staff to former Secretary of State John F. Kerry, said it is imperative for Trump to draw “clear lines about American interests and then find common ground, if there is any. Part of why going in without an agenda is so dangerous — you could end up having the entire conversation on his topics and his terms.”
With Putin, Finer said, “there’s a sense that personalities matter, but at the end of the day he’s someone who has a strong sense of what Russian interests should be, and he’s not going to deviate from that.”
Those who have met with Putin describe him as a direct and forceful negotiator. Though he and Bush developed an initial rapport, their relations soured amid the Bush administration’s war on terror and Russia’s conflict in Georgia.
After their first meeting in 2001, Bush proclaimed Putin “very straightforward and trustworthy.” That assessment has since been widely ridiculed, but Thomas Graham, who served as Russia director at the National Security Council under Bush, said critics leave out the rest of Bush’s assessment that Putin was “a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”
“That turned out to be true,” Graham said. Putin “knew what he wanted; he had messages he wanted to convey.”