On Russia, There Are Two Trumps
On Russia, There Are Two Trumps
His team is going hard after Moscow. The president is not.
By
MICHAEL CROWLEY and
BLAKE HOUNSHELL
March 17, 2018
Czarek Sokolowski/AP Photo
When it comes to Russia, there is the Trump administration — and there is the president.
The Trump administration denounces Russia for using nerve agent on British soil. President Donald Trump says nothing for days, then calls it “a very sad situation.”
The Trump administration castigates Russia for indiscriminate killing in Syria. Trump says nothing about it.
The Trump administration sanctions Russian hackers for meddling in the 2016 election. Trump muses that it could have been China or “many other people.”
The Trump administration condemns Putin’s unveiling of a new generation of Russian nuclear weapons. Trump remains silent.
Trump’s intelligence community stands by its conclusion that the Kremlin sought to help elect Trump in 2016. Trump insists the Russians actually opposed his election because he’s “a big military person.”
Trump’s national security adviser calls the evidence of Russian interference “incontrovertible.” Trump
rebukes him on Twitter the next day.
The Trump administration pushes to harden America’s defenses for the 2018 midterms. Trump won’t even convene a meeting on the subject.
The Trump administration reassures NATO countries that America has their back against Russian intimidation. Trump complains incessantly that they need to pay more for their own defense.
Add it all up, and it amounts to the deepest national security breach between a president and his own advisers in memory — a bizarre disconnect between an administration scrambling to respond to Vladimir Putin’s revanchist assault on the West, and a chief executive who openly admires the Kremlin leader and has yet to allay suspicions that his relationship with Russia was not on the level. It’s the greatest mystery in American politics: What, exactly, explains Donald Trump’s love affair with Moscow?
“There has always been a gap between what the U.S. government — whether it’s the State Department, Defense Department, intelligence agencies, Treasury Department —has been saying to steadily increase pressure on the Russian government and what the president has said,” said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It is obvious there is pent-up frustration between the agencies to push forward.”
***
In recent weeks, that frustration has begun to translate into an increasingly confrontational posture toward Putin’s Russia. On Friday, the Treasury Department slapped sanctions on several Russians for interfering in the 2016 election. The White House’s January national security strategy slammed Moscow as a threat to global stability and a political meddler that “challenge American power, influence, and interests.” And a Pentagon national defense strategy released soon after declared that Russia is “undermining the international order.”
On March 1, the Trump administration even took a step vetoed by President Barack Obama. State Department notified Congress that it intends to sell some $47 million in antitank missiles to Ukraine for use against Russian aggression. When some top Obama national security officials recommended a similar step, Obama rejected the idea.
Meanwhile, the headlines are awash with officials not named Trump slamming Russia on several fronts.
On Thursday, national security adviser H.R. McMaster tore into Russia, saying it was “complicit” in Syrian regime “atrocities” and warning that “all nations must respond more forcefully than simply issuing strong statements.”
At the United Nations, ambassador Nikki Haley has denounced the Kremlin so many times it has stopped being news, on issues ranging from Syria to Ukraine, over which Haley recently demanded “clear and strong condemnation.”
As for cyber and political meddling, d
uring Senate testimony last month, Mike Rogers, the departing head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, re-affirmed the conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election and warned that Putin would “continue this activity” if he doesn’t meet a firmer U.S. response.
And after Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee declared on Monday that the Kremlin wasn’t trying to help Trump get elected after all — but rather just seeking to sow chaos — a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the intelligence community stands by its October 2016 findings to the contrary.
Finally, there was Rex Tillerson, who took the secretary of state job last year speaking hopefully of better dialogue with Russia — but closed out his tenure with several shots at Putin’s government, including a Monday statement saying he was “outraged” by the nerve agent attack and a warning, in his farewell remarks, that Moscow’s “troubling behavior” invited further isolation.
A day after Tillerson’s sacking, his department also released a withering statement about Russia’s “sham” annexation of Crimea that declared that Russia “disdains the international order and disrespects the territorial integrity of sovereign nations.”
It’s true that Trump has had to sign off on his administration’s tough policy actions. But that makes his refusal to criticize Putin all the more curious.
There have been some recent signs of a hardening, even on Trump’s part. Twice this week in remarks to reporters, Trump echoed the British government’s charges that Russia was behind the poisoning with nerve agent of a Russian double agent in London this month. “It certainly looks like the Russians were behind it,” Trump said in the Oval Office Thursday.
But Trump didn’t linger long on the subject, and didn’t summon anything like the outrage expressed by Tillerson and Haley, who called at the U.N. this week for “immediate concrete measures” against Moscow and warned that its next attack could come in New York City.
Perhaps the most deafening silence of all involves Trump’s non-response to Putin’s remarkably bellicose February national address in which he announced the development of new nuclear weapons — including one that “flies to its target like a meteorite like a ball of fire” — that he claimed can defeat U.S. defenses. An accompanying video Putin played showed one of the weapons slamming into southern Florida, in the approximate area where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located.
Conley recalled Trump’s reaction after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatened, in a January address, that he could strike the U.S. with nuclear weapons. Trump angrily tweeted in response: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his.”
In this case, a State Department spokeswoman mocked Putin’s video as “cheesy,” Defense Secretary James Mattis called the chest-thumping “disappointing,” and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders offered a mild critique of the weapons as “destabilizing.”
But more than two weeks after Putin’s threat, Trump has publicly said nothing.
Blake Hounshell is the editor in chief of POLITICO Magazine.
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