DAMN-"An Amateur Boxer Up Against Muhammad Ali": Washington Fears Trump Will Be No Match for Putin "
All American Presidents adore the pageantry of summits, none more so 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 the mystery of 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 neighboring Russia if Putin asked him to on Monday. “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 that 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.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/an-amateur-boxer-up-against-muhammad-ali-washington-fears-trump-will-be-no-match-for-putin-in-helsinki
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