To distinguish friend and foe
President Trump’s pathetic attempt at backpedaling on Tuesday — late, hedged, incomplete — failed to undo the damage of his joint appearance with Vladimir Putin in Finland the day before. Trump’s extraordinary effort to get along with the tyrant, culminating with his dismissal of the thoroughly documented Russian attack on the 2016 election, raises the question of motive.
Does Trump simply admire authoritarians? Does he feel a special gratitude to the Russian president for supporting his candidacy? Has he been compromised by favors or threats yet to be revealed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller?
Or, to play president’s advocate, could there be a legitimate policy reason for Trump’s kowtowing to the Kremlin? In a word: no. Trump’s argument is that warm relations with Russia are inherently desirable. “Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump insisted before the summit. In his subsequent joint press conference with Putin, he added, “From the earliest days of our republic, American leaders have understood that diplomacy and engagement is preferable to conflict and hostility.”
That might be news to the British, who saw considerable hostility from American leaders both in the earliest days of our republic, when they were violently expelled from it, and last week, when Trump gratuitously insulted Prime Minister Theresa May. Besides being contradicted by the president’s own approach to allies and adversaries alike — from his provocation of Germany over trade and defense to his unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal — Trump’s case for making Russia our new best friend doesn’t withstand examination.
Friendly relations are preferable to the alternative as a means to national ends, not in and of themselves. To treat comity as the chief goal of foreign policy is to propose unlimited concessions to hostile and wayward regimes. We can be friends with just about anyone if we’re willing to give up enough and expect nothing in return.
Trump’s summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, for example, was remarkably free of concrete results, and yet he counted his friendly conversation with the rogue dictator as an achievement. And while the president’s craven failure to stand up for Ukraine or the United States in Helsinki drew deserved rebukes from within his party and administration, he declared his deferential audience with the Russian president a diplomatic success.
It was certainly a success for Putin, whose Foreign Ministry hastened to agree with Trump in blaming tensions on “U.S. foolishness and stupidity” as well as the Mueller investigation — and whose foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, rated the summit “better than super.” The Russian regime cares little for friendship with the United States or anyone else, taking every opportunity to weaken the Western order, an objective Trump dramatically advanced. Friendships like this remind us why we have enemies.