AMATEUR HOUR WITH TRUMP
His first encounter with Putin made him look weak and threatens American security
The Group of 20 summit is over, and some conservatives — after giving President Trump a mulligan for his clumsy outing at NATO in May — are declaring his first major international conference a success.
In fact, the president’s trip to Hamburg and his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin were, to use one of the president’s favorite words, a disaster. Not only did he fail to restore the West’s shaken confidence in American leadership, he also made a series of rookie blunders in his meeting with Putin that will now bedevil U.S. national security for years to come.
Before his arrival at the G-20, Trump read a speech in Poland that many conservatives gamely tried to compare to the Cold War rhetoric of earlier presidents, in a flash of hope that Trump would later put the smirking Russian president in his place. Despite a few nice turns, however, it nonetheless carried the usual antiMuslim barnacles that Trump’s White House can’t help but stick onto everything. If the president opened a child care center in Wisconsin, his staff would find a way to claim it as a blow against jihadi terror. RISKY BUSINESS Once in Hamburg, the president demonstrated America’s seriousness of purpose by saying nothing of note and letting his daughter sit at the principals’ table. While Germany’s Angela Merkel politely allowed that national leaders can delegate their seats, one can only imagine the rage of conservatives had a President Hillary Clinton named her daughter to a White House position and seated her among the leaders of the G-20. Instead, they pointed to Merkel’s politeness, claiming that Trump’s embarrassing nepotism was not a big deal.
But no one was really watching the G-20 meetings. The main attraction was the Trump-Putin encounter Friday, and it went predictably poorly.
First, Trump and his team lost control of events because they banned everyone but the principals and the translators from the room. The president is apparently now so concerned about leaks that he went into a mini summit without his top Russia expert or national security adviser. This is not only risky but foolish, since these are the experts who would need to analyze what happened. Even the Russians wanted more people in the room, according to
The New York Times. It is a remarkable turn of events when the Kremlin fears transparency less than the White House.
Russian television later showed Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reading out the meeting. The White House insisted on an awkward audio-only brief from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. This again made the Russians look more confident and open than the Americans.
Worse, the Russians immediately dropped a version of events that made Trump look weak. The president, they asserted, had indeed raised Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election — and Putin not only denied everything, he demanded proof. Later, in a masterful bit of public trolling, Putin said he had convinced Trump that Russia was not involved. INANE CYPER PROPOSAL The White House scrambled to insist that Trump talked tough, especially Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. But she wasn’t there and increasingly seems disconnected from Trump’s actual policies. The president’s staff and even Tillerson were not convincing.
Now the administration is trying to assure Americans it will hold Putin accountable with an agreement to open a joint Russian-American cybersecurity center. This is so ridiculous that even in Moscow they must be wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. A major goal of U.S. cybersecurity policy should be defending against the Russians, not handing them the keys to our computers and explaining our strategy as though they are a trusted ally.
In summary, the G-20 “successes” were: a competent speech in Warsaw that nonetheless contained dog whistles to authoritarians and white nationalists; a humiliating absence of leadership in Hamburg (except for the brief unveiling of Princess Regent Ivanka); a woefully unprepared and understaffed U.S. team; a narrative of the meeting now controlled by the Kremlin; a pass for the most brazen Russian attack on U.S. political institutions ever; and a cybersecurity proposal so inane it beggars belief.
A smashing success, perhaps, for Trump loyalists who either don’t know any better or who must disingenuously keep pushing the party line against reality itself. For the rest of us, it was exactly the collapse of the American amateurs in the face of the Russian professionals that we predicted — and feared.