Europeans can only hope that Mr Trump will stick to his briefing notes.
Mr Putin’s hostility to Europe’s institutions and values comes with a strategic calculus. The question is with what goals and what leverage one approaches the Russian president. Of course, US-Russia dialogue is needed on many crucial issues, from the Middle East to North Korea. But Mr Trump’s inconsistent and incoherent foreign policy record seems to owe more to impulse, egotism and the last voice he has heard than a sustained worldview. The “barbarians at the gate” address reflected the ideological fixations of his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and speechwriter, Stephen Miller.
His embrace of a nationalist, populist government strongly at odds with the EU said a lot about his notion of “the west”. Much of this was on show in Mr Trump’s Warsaw speech. They associate with ultra-traditionalist, intolerant Christian ideologues. They overdo the alpha-male, macho stunts.
They are illiberals with a zero-sum game view of the world and utter disdain for democracy. What Mr Trump and Mr Putin do have in common is not encouraging. He can say he has lived up to exactly what he said it’s just that what he said won’t be the words that Mr Trump thought he heard. His technique is to give the person he is talking to the impression that he is in agreement, only for it to turn out that his meticulously chosen words carried nuances which amounted in fact to total disagreement. Mr Putin will sniff out the egomania, and play on the narcissism. A monumental Trump misstep is very possible in Hamburg: suddenly selling out Ukraine, or offering Russia sanctions relief with no conditions attached. But, of course, he won’t have bothered to read any of it nor is he prone to listening to sound advice. There is immense expertise on Mr Putin and Russia in the Trump White House: Fiona Hill, in charge of Russia policy at the National Security Council, wrote a book that says just about everything Mr Trump needs to know. Mr Putin, who reads intelligence files closely, has a special talent for finessing and outmanoeuvring interlocutors. Mr Trump’s grasp of complex international issues is limited, to put it mildly, and stands in contrast to the emphatic way Mr Putin likes to demonstrate his mastery of detail. Any concession he makes will draw suspicion, and any pressure he may exert will look like grandstanding. (On Thursday, he was still busy questioning Russia’s hand in the hacking). Investigations into Moscow’s meddling in US elections and connections between Mr Trump’s campaign team and Kremlin-connected networks make for a toxic backdrop. But it quickly foundered, not least because of Russia’s growing authoritarianism, its aggression in Ukraine and its intervention in Syria.Īmerica is incomparably richer and more powerful than Russia, but Mr Trump enters this meeting with a weak hand. When Barack Obama arrived, he attempted a “reset” with Russia. Later events showed how fraught the relationship would become, whether over Nato plans or the 2008 Georgia war. Mr Putin had told the story of a family Orthodox cross miraculously found in the rubble of a burned-down dacha – appealing to Mr Bush’s religious sentiment. In 2001, George W Bush famously said he looked into Mr Putin’s eyes at their first meeting and “was able to get a sense of his soul”. Mr Trump is the fourth US president that he has sounded out. But the greater likelihood is that Mr Putin will have had a cakewalk. To be sure, Mr Trump is likely to claim “a HUGE success!” afterwards. This reflects Mr Trump’s unpredictability as much as Mr Putin’s tactics: on the eve of the meeting, even Mr Trump’s aides seemed to be in the dark as to what he would do or say. With the international liberal order shaken by Mr Trump’s ascendance, never has so much uncertainty hung over a high-level US-Russia encounter in the post-Soviet era. He was schooled in them as a KGB counter-intelligence officer. The Russian president is an adept practitioner of mind games. But the message has come late, and will not dispel Mr Putin’s hopes of capitalising on the growing gap between Mr Trump and the Europeans. This will, to a degree, have reassured allies. Last month the US broadened sanctions against Russian companies and individuals. On Thursday, visiting Poland, he expressed support for Nato’s collective security guarantees and urged Russia to “cease its destabilising activities in Ukraine and elsewhere”. D onald Trump is expected to hold his first meeting as US president with Vladimir Putin on Friday, at the G20 summit in Hamburg.
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