Washington and the World
Trump wanted to be friends with Putin. But it was his policies, not his friendship, that mattered.
Trump and Putin give a joint press conference in Helsinki in 2018. | Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Opinion by Jessica Pisano
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Jessica Pisano is an associate professor of politics at the New School for Social Research and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.
Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched a ground war against Ukraine that he apparently has been planning for years, many have wondered why he waited until now. After all, the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency were an ebb tide of American power and influence, and Trump himself frequently went out of his way not to antagonize the Russian leader.
Wouldn’t it have been easier for Putin to invade Ukraine when Trump was president? The United States had abdicated its traditional leadership role in global alliances and left much of the rest of the world open to expanded Chinese and Russian influence. Plus, NATO had already expanded eastward to Russia’s borders, and the Kremlin already controlled Crimea and had proxies in the Donbas.
Some American politicians and commentators on the political right have tried to answer the question by comparing the purported strength or weakness of President Joe Biden with that of Trump, alleging that Putin saw Trump as stronger than Biden, even though Putin’s own description of Trump suggested the opposite. But beyond personality, there’s a far more likely and logical explanation if you look at policy alignment between Russia and America during the two administrations: With Trump in office, Putin was already getting what he wanted. The election changed all that.
Consider where Trump and Biden stand on three key issue areas the Kremlin cares deeply about: NATO, political leadership in Ukraine and undermining democracy. Under Trump, there was little daylight between Russia and the United States on these issues.
Even as Trump’s vocal criticisms may have inadvertently strengthened the alliance, Trump worked to diminish the influence of NATO, reportedly planning to withdraw from it in his second term. As a candidate, Trump had even remarked that, “Maybe NATO will dissolve, and that’s OK, that’s not the worst thing in the world.”
Trump also broke with longstanding bipartisan support of Ukraine. During the Trump administration’s first year, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was still a showman whose comedy troupe performed patriotic musical numbers with lyrics like “There’s fog over Brussels and frost in Washington” and used a MeToo leitmotif comparing Ukraine’s treatment by Russia and the West to a sexual assault. When Zelenskyy beat an incumbent president in a landslide, Trump actually withheld military aid to Ukraine, sending personal emissaries to Kyiv to try to pressure and undermine Zelenskyy in the eyes of Ukrainians by asking him to “do us a favor, though.”
And both while in office and since leaving it, Trump worked tirelessly to cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections, going to great yet unsuccessful lengths to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential contest. Trump makes assertions about American elections that echo the Kremlin’s, even reciting a trope about voting by “dead souls” that comes from 19th century Russian literature. At rallies Trump repeats the same claims he made the day of the January 6 attack on the Capitol: “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”
The truth is that during his administration, Trump’s policy alignment with Putin advanced the aims of Russia’s political elites, who could imagine that the United States was on their side. Their comfort with Trump was evident from the start; Americans may remember that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was warmly received in the White House and photographed in the Oval Office, while Russian parliament members toasted Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.
This comfort evaporated with the election of Biden. And for good reason: from the start, the Biden administration has been at odds with Putin on the issues Putin needs to care about to preserve his own rule. After Biden’s election, Russian political elites once again articulated profound, existential anxieties about a renewed United States projecting its power abroad. State television in Russia emphasized the Kremlin will not allow American influence in Ukraine, “regardless of the cost to us, and regardless of the cost to those responsible for it.”
The Biden White House has taken positions opposite those of the Trump administration on NATO. Biden has insisted on principles of state sovereignty, reaffirming and rebuilding the United States’ trans-Atlantic relationships, including strengthening NATO.
Biden took meaningful steps to support Ukraine in defending itself. Far from undermining Ukraine’s democratically elected government, the Biden administration has tried to create roadblocks for the Kremlin by getting inside Putin’s decision cycle, declassifying and broadcasting intelligence about Russia’s plans to attack Ukraine. Biden exhausted diplomatic channels trying to come to a peaceful resolution and worked with allies to prepare a sanctions package in advance of a Russian invasion.
And Biden has worked to protect democracy. Unlike Trump, rather than questioning the integrity of contests his party lost, Biden has spoken forcefully about the close legal scrutiny and fairness of all the 2020 elections. And he has supported congressional efforts to protect the franchise in the United States.
In Trump, Putin had a fellow-traveler. Far from ensuring world peace, the Trump years instead offered Putin a useful pause he utilized to further military readiness and prime the Russian population for a hot war. Earlier this month, the Russian state adopted new standards for mass graves — not because of the coronavirus pandemic in Russia, but for situations that involve “urban destruction.”
This war is unfolding on Ukrainian territory, but the war is not only against Ukraine: much of Russia’s political leadership has come to see itself as at war with the Western world. In 2018, Kremlin mouthpiece Dmitry Kiselyov suggested on national television that Russia could reduce the United States to a “pile of radioactive ash.” The same year, describing the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the U.K. as “only the beginning,” Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer warned that Russia was preparing for broad action against the West to create panic and paralyze Western countries, including a long-planned “special period” of political destabilization and violence in the West once war had begun and diplomats had been recalled.
Far from deterring Putin, Trump did the opposite. Thanks to Trump, Putin was able to take advantage of a period of apparent detente during which Trump actually pursued Putin’s own policies of weakening NATO and democracy and destabilizing the West — leaving Putin free to prepare his war against the free people of Ukraine and their democratically elected government.
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