Eye to eye with Putin
So, it’s finally going to happen. President Trump will come face to face with the world leader he insisted he was going to find so much common ground with — Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Trump and Putin will meet this week on the sidelines of the G-20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany.
And sure, under most circumstances, the list of possible topics would be a lengthy one — the war in Syria, Russian aggression in Ukraine, continuing cyberattacks traced back to Russia. But we all know this is no ordinary president and these are no ordinary times.
“There’s no specific agenda — it’s really going to be whatever the president wants to talk about,” said Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser.
(Well, let’s just hope the topic of Mika Brezezinki’s alleged facelift doesn’t come up.)
Trump, you’ll recall, carried on quite the little long-distance bromance with Putin during the 2016 campaign. Time and time again he insisted “wouldn’t it be a great thing if we could get along with Russia,” even as Putin was ordering up cyberattacks aimed at skewing the American election.
Trump can deny the existence of those attacks all he wants — and we’ll be the first to admit they had little or no impact on the election results — but to continue to deny the threat posed by the world’s most territorially ambitious leader would be hopelessly naïve.
Then, of course, there was Trump being Trump in a September interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer:
“If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him. I’ve already said, he is really very much of a leader. I mean, you can say, ‘ Oh, isn’t that a terrible thing’ — the man has very strong control over a country. Now, it’s a very different system, and I don’t happen to like the system. But certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.”
Yes, Trump has a certain fondness for despots. He proved during his meetings in Saudi Arabia and in a White House meeting with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he gets along quite nicely with them.
Certainly Trump’s own advisers harbor no illusions about the nature of the Putin threat. McMaster has insisted the president will aim to confront “Russia’s destabilizing behavior,” including cyberthreats or political subversion.
We remember the words of President George W. Bush — words he would regret the rest of his political life — who after meeting Putin said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
Sen. John McCain came much closer when he said, “When I looked in Putin’s eyes I saw three letters — K-G-B.”