Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Russia offers Trump no easy policy choices
Between Moscow’s actions, Congress’ hard line, president is in a familiar spot
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has been backed into a corner on Russia policy, facing only bad options — pressed by President Vladimir Putin on one side and, from the other, by assertive U.S. lawmakers who don’t trust Trump to stand up to the autocrat.
A near-unanimous Congress last week sent to the White House a sanctions bill that clamps down on Russia, along with Iran and North Korea, and ties Trump’s hands from offering Putin relief from existing sanctions. Putin has retaliated by demanding the United States slash its diplomatic presence by about two-thirds, or 755 people.
Trump is caught in the middle. At home, he’s under pressure to sign the sanctions bill into law and aides say he will, if only because Congress could easily override a veto. Signing the bill, however, could sink his effort to improve relations with Russia and Putin.
“He clearly is uncomfortable,” said Alexander Vershbow, a U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2001 through 2005.
Here and on the world stage, Trump runs the risk of looking weak if he doesn’t react boldly to Russia’s Cold War-style expulsion of so many U.S. Embassy personnel. Yet over the last few days, Trump has been silent against a hostile act that in any prior administration would have provoked a presidential response.
“The president does look a little weak certainly vis-avis the Congress, but at the same there’s also the psychological unwillingness to speak out against Putin,” said Vershbow, now a fellow at the Atlantic Council. “It’s always been inexplicable. It’s become even more inexplicable.”
Instead, Trump has left it to Vice President Mike Pence, who is traveling abroad, to fire back against the Kremlin.
“Very soon, President Trump will sign legislation to strengthen and codify the United States’ sanctions against Russia,” Pence said in a speech Tuesday in Tbilisi, Georgia, during a swing through former Soviet republics bordering Russia’s western border.
The United States “prefers a constructive relationship with Russia,” Pence said. “But the president and our Congress are unified in our message to Russia — a better relationship, the lifting of sanctions, will require Russia to reverse the actions that caused the sanctions to be imposed in the first place. And not before.”
Those actions included Russia’s annexation of Crimea, formerly part of Ukraine, and its support of pro-Russian separatists fighting in Ukraine’s east.
Trump tried to develop a friendship with Putin over the first six months of his administration, mostly by phone, until the two men met extensively last month at a summit of leading nations in Hamburg, Germany. Their contacts there included a private discussion of more than two hours and a long chat during a dinner closing the summit.
But early on, their efforts at building rapport seemed destined to falter. Hanging over their courtship is the investigation by a Justice Department special counsel into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to win the election.
The sanctions bill that cleared Congress last week, over administration objections, is being reviewed by West Wing lawyers, Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Tuesday to explain why Trump hasn’t signed it yet.
“There is nothing holding him back. There is a review process, a legal process they are going through and he will sign the bill and we will let you guys know,” Sanders said.
Only last month Trump was openly celebrating his new ties to Putin. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One en route to Paris, France, in mid-July, the president said he would be open to inviting the Russian president to the White House at some point.
“If you don’t have dialogue, you have to be fools — fools,” Trump said. “It would be the easiest thing for me to say ... ‘I will never speak to him,’ and everybody would love me. But I have to do what’s right,” he said.
Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a former aide to the former British prime minister, said Trump is taking the path of the previous two presidents — Obama and George W. Bush — who came into office seeking better relations with Russia, only to run into the hard reality that Putin’s interests are fundamentally at odds with America’s.
“The reality is you can’t get along with Vladimir Putin,” he said.