The Wall Street Journal
Putin Is Not America’s Friend !
We’ll find out in the coming weeks how Vladimir Putin sized up Donald Trump in their first mano a mano meeting on Friday, but one bad sign is the Trump team’s post-meeting resort to Obama -like rhetoric of cooperation and shared U.S.-Russia purposes.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson frequently lapses into this form of John Kerry-speak as he did trying to sell the new U.S.-Russia-brokered cease-fire in a corner of Syria. “I think this is our first indication of the U.S. and Russia being able to work together in Syria,” Mr. Tillerson told reporters.
He added: “I would tell you that, by and large, our objectives are exactly the same. How we get there, we each have a view. But there’s a lot more commonality to that than there are differences. So we want to build on the commonality, and we spent a lot of time talking about next steps. And then where there’s differences, we have more work to get together and understand. Maybe they’ve got the right approach and we’ve got the wrong approach.”
The same objectives? The Russians want to help their client Bashar Assad win back all of Syria while retaining their military bases. If they are now talking about a larger cease-fire, it’s only because they think that can serve Mr. Assad’s purposes. The Trump Administration doesn’t seem to know what it wants in Syria after Islamic State is ousted from Raqqa, and we hope Mr. Tillerson isn’t saying the U.S. shares the same post-ISIS goals as Russia.
As for the right or wrong “approach” to Syria, the Pentagon believes Russia knew in advance about Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons this year. The U.S. fired cruise missiles in response and has since shot down an Assad airplane bombing U.S. allies on the ground, which drew a threat of Russian reprisal if the U.S. did it again. Somehow “approach” doesn’t capture this moral and military difference.
Then there’s Mr. Trump’s Sunday tweet that “Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded.” No doubt Mr. Putin, the KGB man, would love to get an insight into America’s cyber secrets, though don’t count on any of those secrets being “guarded,” much less “impenetrable.”
Republican Senator Marco Rubio had it right on Sunday when he tweeted that “partnering with Putin on a ‘Cyber Security Unit’ is akin to partnering with Assad on a ‘Chemical Weapons Unit’.” He added, in advice Mr. Trump could help himself by taking, that “while reality & pragmatism requires that we engage Vladimir Putin, he will never be a trusted ally or a reliable constructive partner.”
Mr. Trump’s actions toward Russia so far, such as bombing an Assad airfield and unleashing U.S. oil and gas production, have been far tougher than anything Barack Obama dared. But the U.S. President clearly wants a better relationship with Mr. Putin, and the comments by both Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Trump after their Friday meeting aren’t exactly hardheaded. Next time they should invite national security adviser H.R. McMaster or U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley into the meeting. Those two seem less impressed by the Kremlin conniver.
Congress can play a fortifying role here by moving ahead with the bill toughening sanctions against Russia for its election meddling. The Senate passed the bill 98-2, and Republicans can move it quickly in the House with some fixes for oil investments. The White House objects that the bill takes away discretion from Mr. Trump to reduce sanctions unilaterally. But that discretion shouldn’t be granted until Messrs. Trump and Tillerson show that they understand that Mr. Putin is not America’s friend.