“An Amateur Boxer Up Against Muhammad Ali”: Washington Fears Trump Will Be No Match for Putin in Helsinki

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On Monday in Helsinki, Trump will have his long-awaited summit with Vladimir Putin. Many in Washington are anxious that the summit will be a debacle of the President’s own making.Photograph by Mikhail Klimentyev / AFP / Getty

All American Presidents adore the pageantry of summits, none more than Donald Trump, who is addicted to the idea of himself as one of the great men making history with a capital “H.” Trump loved his recent Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un so much that he came out of it sounding like a love-struck teen-ager, bragging about an illusory deal and commending the “strong,” “funny,” “smart” dictator, who also happened to be a “great negotiator.” On Monday, in Helsinki, Trump will have his long-awaited summit with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, a meeting he has personally pursued over the cautions of his advisers and despite the long political shadow of alleged Russian influence over his 2016 campaign. Beyond the allure of aggrandizement and President Trump’s affinity for the Russian strongman, why the meeting is taking place now remains a mystery. Is the purpose to discuss arms control? Syria? Ukraine? To rehash the 2016 election? Remarkably, it’s not clear, and that in and of itself marks this as a most unusual summit. In Brussels on Thursday, after two days of at times openly hostile meetings with his NATO allies, Trump was asked whether he would consider scrapping military exercises in the Baltic states if Putin asked him on Monday to do so. “Perhaps we’ll talk about that,” he replied, to the great alarm and consternation of Europeans who had been publicly reassured by American officials that Trump would do no such thing. Who knows? Despite the buildup, the Helsinki summit, the President acknowledged, is just a “loose meeting.”

Putin could not have set up the summit better if he had scripted it himself. Over two days this week, at the annual meeting of the NATO alliance, which Putin views as his mortal enemy, the American President disregarded the plan for a show of “unity and strength” that his own NATO Ambassador had promised and instead manufactured an utterly predictable crisis with his allies. First, Trump turned a breakfast photo op into a Germany-bashing session, accusing the most important U.S. partner on the Continent of being “controlled by Russia” because of a pending new energy pipeline. “Clearly, he’s on a mission to blow up the summit,” a former senior U.S. official who was at NATO headquarters told me, a few minutes after Trump’s breakfast-table tirade. “Nothing could make Putin happier.” By Thursday morning, that was exactly what Trump had done, throwing the summit into an emergency session over his demands that Germany and others drastically increase their military spending.

Point made, Trump then called a hastily assembled news conference to claim that the allies had bowed to his demands and made new spending commitments (the French President, Emmanuel Macron, quickly rebutted him) while musing warmly about whether Putin might someday become his “friend.” No one was surprised, and yet everyone was outraged: a classic Trump-era response. As the President flew off to Britain, Damon Wilson, a Republican who worked at the National Security Council under George W. Bush, seemed to capture the mood among America’s beleaguered partners, tweeting, “I’m here at #NATOSummit, surrounded by US allies, and I sense battered-spouse syndrome. They’re beaten down and then praised. From tense to ‘collegial spirit.’ ‘No problem.’ Whiplash.”

Expect more whiplash when Trump arrives in Helsinki for the Putin meeting, a potential debacle very much of the President’s own making. Trump himself proposed the summit in a March phone call with the Russian leader, and, after the Kim summit, the President ordered members of his staff to prepare the Putin meeting, which many of them wanted to avoid. “There’s no stopping him,” a senior Administration official told me in June. “He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.” At the time, advisers still hoped to delay the summit, or at least to use the opportunity to produce a real, substantive policy agenda with proposals for Trump that actually reflect American foreign policy. It is now clear that they failed on both counts.

There is no agreed-upon substantive agenda for the meeting, as Trump himself confirmed on Thursday, and the session will take place only a couple weeks after the date was finalized. The sum total of the preparation was a single trip by Trump’s national-security adviser, John Bolton, to Moscow. He came out of the trip with none of the “deliverables” typically determined in advance of such high-level summits. (“The meeting is the deliverable,” the Russians apparently told Bolton.) Few details about the summit have been released by the White House, given Trump’s penchant for last-minute changes, but as of now it appears that it will be a four-hour affair (rather than the seven hours requested by the Kremlin), with a lengthy one-on-one between Trump and Putin first, followed by an expanded meeting to include Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman. Fiona Hill, the top National Security Council adviser for Russia, isn’t going to be in the meeting, though a White House official told me she was going to be on the ground in Finland, and even a talked-about preparatory session between Pompeo and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, is not going to happen. According to current and former officials, Bolton’s N.S.C. has not had a single principals-level meeting to discuss Russia policy or the plans for the summit in advance of what will certainly be one of the most important sessions of Trump’s Presidency.

I asked one former senior U.S. official, who speaks regularly with colleagues still in the government, to characterize the mood headed into Helsinki. “Apprehensive,” he said. A U.S. Ambassador to a NATO ally added, “Everybody’s crossing their fingers and holding their breath.” Even promoters of closer ties between the U.S. and Russia are wary. The goal should be “to establish a tiny modicum of mutual trust, which really does not exist in the relationship today,” Dimitri Simes, the president of the Center for the National Interest, who hosted Trump for the first major foreign-policy speech of his 2016 candidacy with an audience that included the Russian Ambassador, said. Simes, a Soviet émigré who maintains close ties to senior officials in Putin’s government, said anything more than that would be too risky,.

Needless to say, one preparatory trip, no formal agenda, and no “deliverables” is not normal for a summit between the heads of the world’s two biggest nuclear-armed nations. Washington usually spends months, or even years, working up to a meeting between the President and the leader of Russia. But not this time. During the past few days, I’ve asked sixteen former U.S. government officials who have worked with every American President going back to Ronald Reagan, including a former national-security adviser, four U.S. Ambassadors to Russia, the former top U.S. national intelligence officer for Russia, and two Deputy Secretaries of State, about summit preparation. The former officials, who often disagree about Russia, do not now: they are as united as I’ve ever heard them, in nearly two decades of Russia-watching, that there is no historical precedent for Trump’s meeting with Putin. Especially concerning is the fact that the U.S. government is headed into such a summit with a degraded and disregarded policy apparatus that has been systematically marginalized and excluded from the President’s actual foreign policy. Many of the former officials told me they were genuinely alarmed at the hostile state of relations between Russia and the United States, a state of affairs almost invariably described these days as the worst since the Cold War, and said they would welcome a productive face-to-face meeting between the two leaders. But few expect that to be the case.

“I’ve been involved with most U.S.-Russian high-level encounters since then-Vice President George H. W. Bush’s first meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1985,” John Beyrle, a retired career diplomat who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in the waning days of George W. Bush’s Presidency and through Barack Obama’s first term, said. “There is no historical precedent that I know of for such a potentially high-stakes U.S.-Russia meeting to take place with so little advance preparation, and with such a dark cloud of suspicion and uncertainty hanging over it. We really are in uncharted waters here.” Asked what word or phrase best summed up Trump’s approach to Putin, Beyrle responded, “untethered” and “daydream-ish.” Tom Graham, the top N.S.C. official for Russia during Putin’s first term, added “contradictory and incoherent,” as well as “ideologically driven and non-strategic.” Even the hastily pulled-together Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, Graham said, “had more time for planning.”

As for the summit’s outcome, I asked all the former officials to consider the best—and worst—possible results. Most came down with Kenneth Adelman, a veteran of the Reagan Administration who later wrote a book on Reagan’s 1986 summit with Gorbachev, in Reykjavík. The worst result is “what will happen,” he wrote to me: “Putin’s flattery prompts Trump’s swooning. Policy is shoved aside, lost among all gushes of the ‘great, great, truly great’ personal relationship Trump—unlike any previous President since Chester Arthur—miraculously established.”

Of course, when it comes to substantive issues that should be on the table in Helsinki, there is no lack of possible subjects to discuss, beyond the question of whether Trump will finally call Putin to account for Russia’s 2016 election meddling (doubtful, all agree). The Russian hands with whom I spoke offered a long list of options: the upcoming expiration of the New START arms-control treaty, set to run out in 2021; American complaints over Russian violations of the I.N.F. Treaty; Russian military support for the Syrian regime and collaboration with the Iranians there; and, of course, the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea and Russian military incursion into eastern Ukraine that triggered the current round of sanctions by the United States and its European allies. At various points throughout his Administration, Trump’s top officials have talked tough in regards to all of those issues, and even put in place many policies to counter the Russians that are broadly supported by both parties. But Trump remains pretty much a party of one when it comes to his affinity for Russia and refusal to criticize Putin. (William Burns, a career diplomat who was the Ambassador to Russia before becoming Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State, called the Administration’s policy “schizophrenic,” noting the “huge disconnect between Trump’s instincts and rhetoric and the rest of Administration.”) And, in fact, Trump has undercut the American position on many of the key Russia issues in the weeks leading up to the summit, when, for example, he seemed to parrot the Russian line on why Moscow took over Crimea and spontaneously demanded that Russia be allowed to rejoin the G-7 group of world leaders, from which it had been booted after the Crimea annexation.

All of which is why, in the end, even those most supportive of talking with Putin right now seem to be hoping that not much of anything will come out of the meeting. Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, who was there for Putin’s very first meeting as President with his U.S. counterpart, wondered if Bolton can rein Trump in from “buddy-buddy stuff with Putin” or stop him “from even hinting that Crimea annexation is O.K.” Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s national-security adviser during his second term, put the “best” case this way: “There is no blowup or love fest, there are no major concessions, and the two leaders agree on a few very modest steps to restore relations between the two countries.” Sarah Mendelson, a senior Obama appointee with extensive Russia experience, was even more succinct. Her best case: “Nothing of significance is said or done.”

Even that strikes many of America’s smartest observers of the Putin era as overly optimistic. Most of those I spoke with, Republican and Democrat alike, were resigned to Trump being outplayed by Putin, a view perhaps best summed up by a former State Department official who spent decades preparing meetings between U.S. and Russian leaders. “I’m afraid,” he told me, that “our guy here is like an amateur boxer going up against Muhammad Ali.”