President warns of terrorism in prelude to G-20 Summit
WARSAW, Poland — President Trump’s speech here yesterday cast the fight against terrorism as a clash of civilizations, adopting a framework that two of his predecessors had determinedly avoided and linking it to his controversial policies on immigration.
The speech yesterday — ahead of today’s muchawaited meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin — offered extended praise for what Trump described as the unique virtues of Western civilization, which he said faced “dire threats.”
Those, Trump said, emanate from the “south or the east” — apparently a thinly veiled reference to the Islamic world — and could “erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”
“The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” he said, one of nearly a dozen times he invoked the idea of “will” during the course of the approximately 40minute speech.
On the eve of his first facetoface meeting as president with Putin, Trump declined to hold the Kremlin solely responsible for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, insisting that others may have interfered as well.
Trump’s remarks in Poland, hours before arriving in Germany for a twoday summit of the socalled Group of 20 major and emerging economies, seemed to answer in the negative the main question hanging over his highly anticipated session with Putin: Would he chastise the Russian president in person for what the U.S. intelligence community has said was a complex spy operation designed to undermine the U.S. elections and help Trump win?
Trump did signal areas where he might confront Putin. He chided Russia for “destabilizing activities” in Ukraine and signaled a U.S. intent to step up energy supplies to Eastern Europe, as an alternative to Russian sources that he said Moscow has manipulated to “coerce” weaker neighbors. And he invited Russia to join “the community of responsible nations” in fighting extremism.
In Boston yesterday, U.S. Sen. Edward J. Markey said he’s concerned that Trump won’t pressure Putin on issues ranging from election meddling to Syria and nuclear weaponry.
“I’m concerned that Donald Trump will not raise the issue of the Russian interference in our presidential election last year,” Markey, who sits on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and is a consistent liberal critic of the president, told the Herald. “I’m afraid the president will not raise the issue of Putin’s support for Assad in Syria, which continues a devastating civil war. I’m concerned he will not raise the issue of the Ukraine and the Russian incursion into the Ukraine.”