{"id":9663,"date":"2016-12-09T13:01:13","date_gmt":"2016-12-09T21:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9663"},"modified":"2016-12-09T13:01:13","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T21:01:13","slug":"trumps-russia-reset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumps-russia-reset\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s Russia “Reset”?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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by <\/span>Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Defining Ideas<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
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Throughout the 2016 election, the American Left venomously attacked Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. He was rightly accused of diminishing freedom both inside Russia and within neighboring nations, of gobbling up Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and of eyeing the NATO member Baltic states for his next intervention.<\/p>\n

But Putin\u2019s real crime, in the eyes of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, was supposedly interfering in the 2016 election by using freelance contractors to hack sensitive Democratic Party communications. Indeed, that latter unproven accusation earned threats of retaliation from the normally live-and-let-live Obama administration that had not been likewise so concerned with Russian territorial aggression. Or as Press Secretary Josh Earnest framed the cyber provocation, \u201cThere are a range of responses that are available to the president, and he will consider a response that is proportional.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the election, progressives cast Putin, the murderous strongman, and Donald Trump, the populist bully, as kindred spirits who would forge a working alliance that reflected their respective autocratic natures\u2014all at the expense of democratic idealism the world over. Putin in December 2015 had bragged of Trump, \u201cHe\u2019s a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt.\u201d Trump sometimes responded in kind, most controversially in September 2016: \u201cCertainly, in that system, he\u2019s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader. We have a divided country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet lost in the campaign\u2019s charges and counter-charges over Putin was the recent history of Russian-American relations and an honest appraisal of yet a third likely reset in 2017. Indeed, for presidential administrations, the Russia issue has become like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute: each new administration blames predecessors for failure, and promises that it will finally unlock the impasse\u2014without much recognition that autocrats always act autocratically and are a different breed from their democratic rivals.<\/p>\n

During the 2008 election, the Obama campaign criticized George W. Bush\u2019s estrangement from Russia. It loudly promised new outreach. Accordingly, in Switzerland in March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously pressed a symbolic plastic red \u201creset\u201d button to signal the dawn of a new era in America\u2019s relationship with Russia.<\/p>\n

Obama and Clinton crafted a narrative that Russian estrangement from the United States had been caused by cowboyish Bush who gratuitously offended other world leaders. Since the damage was supposedly caused by American intransigence, the Democrats reasoned, then the relationship could be remedied by the Americans\u2014through rhetorical outreach from a young, charismatic new President Obama, whose devotion to dialogue, soft power, multilateralism, and human rights would carry the day.<\/p>\n

Lost in the excitement was the fact that Obama\u2019s was the second\u2014not the first\u2014reset in recent Russian-American relations. After the August 2008 Russian intrusion into South Ossetia\u2014which may have been triggered by the Bush administration\u2019s suggestions that the United States eventually might support Georgia\u2019s rash, inexperienced, and Westernized president Mikheil Saakashvili in seeking NATO membership\u2014Bush changed course in his relationship to Putin, of whom he had earlier said: \u201cI looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.\u201d But following the 2008 Russian invasion, Bush, weakened by low popularity, the Iraq war, and setbacks in the prior 2006 midterm elections, nevertheless sent a few ships to the Black Sea. He airlifted 1,800 Georgian soldiers from Iraq back home, with U.S. fighters escorting Hercules transports, and provided humanitarian aid. He joined with a European coalition to achieve an armistice to the fighting that kept the peace in most of Georgia.<\/p>\n

Over the next six years, Obama\u2019s own reset likewise failed, and may have had the effect of emboldening Putin\u2019s 2014 aggressions against Crimea and Ukraine. Not that the Obama version of reset was not first tried in full: Obama himself, in an infamous March 2012 open mic admission to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, seemed more than compliant: \u201cOn all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it\u2019s important for him to give me space.\u201d Then Obama whispered, \u201cThis is my last election . . . After my election, I have more flexibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Note that Obama was indirectly referring to then-challenger Mitt Romney\u2019s advocacy for a renewal of the original missile defense agendas for Poland and the Czech Republic. That commitment had been recalibrated and then vastly reduced in September 2009 by President Obama, whose efforts were presented as resetting a supposedly needlessly provocative policy of the outgoing President Bush and his Defense Secretary Robert Gates. (As Obama\u2019s own Defense Secretary, Gates would ironically flip back, and suddenly support his new boss\u2019s decision to abrogate the earlier 2008 Bush-Gates-inspired missile shield.)<\/p>\n

During the October 22, 2012 presidential debate, Romney was also ridiculed by Obama for suggesting that Russia was still a geopolitical threat: \u201cA few months ago when you were asked what\u2019s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaeda; you said Russia, in the 1980s, they\u2019re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War\u2019s been over for 20 years\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

After the election, Romney later would respond that he had been right. And he and others further argued that after an embarrassed American administration had backed down in summer 2013 from its earlier red-line threat to Syria, Obama ended up inviting the Russians back into the Middle East, more than 40 years after being de facto expelled by the Nixon administration in 1974. Buoyed Russian officials, of course, denied that Putin would ever have seen Obama\u2019s empty Syrian red-line threats as encouragement for their various aggressions. Even more mischievously, in Cheshire-cat style, Russian leaders smiled that they had never found Obama to be particularly weak at all.<\/p>\n

Perhaps as compensation, Obama developed a strange habit of publicly insulting Putin while failing to deter him in any meaningful way. In August 2013, Obama explained Putin to the press by contextualizing the Russian President\u2019s sloppy posture: \u201cI know the press likes to focus on body language, and he\u2019s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid at the back of the classroom.\u201d In February, Obama added: \u201cHe does have a public style where he likes to sit back and look a little bored during the course of joint interviews. My sense is that\u2019s part of his shtick back home politically as wanting to look like the tough guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

To much of the world, Obama seemed to be again talking loudly while carrying a twig. Certainly, lecturing Russia about its dismal human rights policies and destabilizing foreign policy, while appearing averse to confrontation, may have earned Putin\u2019s contempt, inspiring him to needle and embarrass Obama wherever and whenever possible.<\/p>\n

By 2016, fairly or not, the Obama reset narrative itself had once again been fully reset. Putin was now deemed a bad seed, a roguish threat just as George W. Bush said he was in 2008. Reset had utterly failed, but the reasons for its demise were now declared to be different and largely due to Putin. After being given a chance by Obama to reform and become a good international citizen, he had chosen to take a different and more aggressive and destructive course. In Obama\u2019s revisionist narrative, Bush blew reset #1, but Putin blew reset #2.<\/p>\n

Note that Putin acted aggressively first in 2008 when his former friend and once-ascendant Bush had become an unpopular lame-duck president, and then again throughout 2014 after his second reset partner Obama had been embarrassed in Syria, abruptly fled Iraq, was flummoxed by the Libyan and Benghazi misadventures, and was heading toward another midterm defeat.<\/p>\n

Enter Donald Trump into this reset drama. Where do we go from here with the President-elect?<\/p>\n

Trump is a Jacksonian realist and will probably resist caricaturing Putin the way Obama did and delivering sermons on human rights. As a profit-seeking businessman, he will likely try to cut a deal with the Russians that seeks common interests in a dangerous, cynical world.<\/p>\n

What would such horse-trading entail? Trump may likely emphasize Russia\u2019s commonalities with the West, mutual antipathy for radical Islamism, a shared desire to end jihadist terrorism, similar irritation with politically correct sermonizing, and common Christian affinities. Trump might grant that a free Syria is now mostly a dead letter\u2014and that the possibility of a viable third-way alternative to ISIS and Assad was long ago undermined by faux red lines and American inaction, and then consumed in the Syrian holocaust. Trump would hope that Putin would drop further designs on former Soviet territory. He might even seek to woo Putin away from Iran, reminding him that Russia has enough nuclear adversaries and rivals\u2014China, North Korea, Pakistan, U.S. bases\u2014near or on its borders to worry about. Planned increases in energy production and export, beefing up the U.S. military, and deregulating the American economy might give Trump some additional material leverage that Obama lacked when dealing with Putin.<\/p>\n

No doubt Trump assumes that his pro-American nationalism will resonate with a nationalist Putin as well. Unspoken is Trump\u2019s likely realpolitik assumption that Russia\u2019s war on human rights within its own borders is unfortunate, but largely out of America\u2019s hands. In any case, faulting Russia in general and Putin in particular for atrocious human rights, while diminishing U.S. hard power and influence, has not proven in the past to offer much leverage on Putin, especially for any president struggling with disapproval at home and disdain abroad.<\/p>\n

In sum, Trump will likely argue that as two strong powers led by proud leaders, Russia\u2019s Putin and his America have agendas that need not be mutually exclusive, at least to the point of colliding in war. Whether this third reset will deter Putin from the Baltic states or from allowing a nuclear Iran to lord over the Middle East is an open question. What is not is that Trump, like George W. Bush\u2019s eye-gazing in 2001 and Barack Obama\u2019s plastic red button in 2009, will seek some sort of understanding with Vladimir Putin\u2014albeit with far less idealistic expectations than his sometimes starry-eyed predecessors. But like his predecessors, Trump believes that he alone has the proper formula and temperament to make it work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Defining Ideas \u00a0 Throughout the 2016 election, the American Left venomously attacked Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. He was rightly accused of diminishing freedom both inside Russia and within neighboring nations, of gobbling up Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and of eyeing the NATO member Baltic states for his next intervention. But Putin\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1092,978,929,375,46,196,185,563,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2vR","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12049,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-big-winner-in-ukraine-scandal-russia-just-as-it-always-wanted\/","url_meta":{"origin":9663,"position":0},"title":"The big winner in Ukraine scandal? Russia \u2014 just as it always wanted","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 8, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"The following article is from my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in The Hill Vladimir Putin\u2019s nightmare is a prosperous, rule-of-law Ukraine integrated into the affluent West on Russia\u2019s border. Such a Ukrainian success story would trace back to its popular revolution on Maidan Square in February 2004. Might Ukraine not\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11821,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-russia-preparing-a-gas-nuclear-option\/","url_meta":{"origin":9663,"position":1},"title":"Is Russia Preparing A Gas Nuclear Option?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 14, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory published\u00a0by\u00a0Forbes Vladimir Putin is noted for taking surprise action, which confronts his victims with a fait accompli. They must then either accept the new unfavorable status quo or react in a way that they would consider too risky. Putin has\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Russia"","block_context":{"text":"Russia","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/russia\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12676,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/armenia-azerbaijan-conflict-adds-to-putins-headaches-wests-worries\/","url_meta":{"origin":9663,"position":2},"title":"Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict adds to Putin’s headaches, West’s worries","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 21, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill The last thing\u00a0Vladimir Putin\u00a0needed is another hotspot in Russia\u2019s \u201cnear abroad\u201d \u2014 Russia\u2019s term for the 14 republics that once were part of the old Soviet Union, along with the Russian Republic.\u00a0 In 2014, Putin boasted of an\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7136,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-hitler-model\/","url_meta":{"origin":9663,"position":3},"title":"The Hitler Model","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Why do weak nations like Russia provoke stronger ones like the United States? by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas\u00a0 An ascendant Vladimir Putin is dismantling the Ukraine and absorbing its eastern territory in the Crimea. President Obama is fighting back against critics that his administration serially projected weakness, and thereby\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Russia"","block_context":{"text":"Russia","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/russia\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/3488885680_b54cd50d37.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7120,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/this-is-the-last-territorial-demand-i-have-to-make-in-europe\/","url_meta":{"origin":9663,"position":4},"title":"‘This Is the Last Territorial Demand I Have to Make in Europe’","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 18, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 Vladimir Putin all but said the above yesterday, after annexing the Crimea \u2014 and promising to let alone the rest of the Ukraine. If we just insert Ukraine and Russia for Czechoslovakia and Germany, the following speech could easily be Putin\u2019s: (Berlin 1938\u00a0Moscow\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Russia"","block_context":{"text":"Russia","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/russia\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11071,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/my-war-with-russian-trolls\/","url_meta":{"origin":9663,"position":5},"title":"My War With Russian Trolls","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 22, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Please read a new essay by my Hoover colleague, Paul Gregory. Vladimir Putin\u2019s propaganda machine has two overarching goals. First, the Russian people must believe the Kremlin version of domestic and world events. In this regard, the agents of Russian \u201cinformation technology\u201d have succeeded. Polls\u00a0show\u00a0that Russians believe that Russia is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Russia"","block_context":{"text":"Russia","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/russia\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9663"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9663"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9664,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9663\/revisions\/9664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}