Trump’s plans for Russia obscure other problems

Alan Philps considers Donald Trump's interest in Russia

One of the few certainties about the Trump presidency since the election was that he envisaged America and Russia working together to stabilise an unsettled world. Don Emmert and Natalia Kolesnikova / AFPShow less

One of the few certainties about the Trump presidency since the election was that he envisaged America and Russia working together to stabilise an unsettled world. Ideas of a Washington-Moscow grand bargain are not new in Washington, though usually they are pushed by starry-eyed amateurs rather than the policy professionals.

During America’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union in 1942, a map was widely published in the United States outlining a post-war “new world moral order” to be policed by Washington, Moscow and the remnants of the British Empire. Bizarrely, in the interest of bringing Joseph Stalin on board, Moscow was given the huge prize of Iran, to be a future “Soviet Socialist Republic”.

Not surprisingly this vision did not survive the end of the Second World War and the fracture of the victorious alliance, leading to decades of cold war whose shadow still hangs over Washington thinking. Only a month after Mr Trump moved into the White House, his mega-deal with the Kremlin has collapsed, and Russia’s expectations of turning a new page with Washington are deflated. The crunch came with the dismissal of his national security adviser, retired general Michael Flynn, for lying over his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the final months of the Obama administration.

Gen Flynn had discussed the easing of US sanctions against Russia over its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and alleged interference in the presidential election. It seems unthinkable that the general should have acted without the president-elect’s green light given how keenly he had wanted to improve relations with Moscow.

Gen Flynn, an ardent conspiracy theorist with a poor record of managing a Washington bureaucracy, has been replaced by a very different character as national security adviser. H R McMaster is a general who has received adoring write-ups in the US press, as a heroic warrior in the 1990 war against Iraq, a successful commander in occupied Iraq after the 2003 invasion and a serious thinker on military policy. His appointment has been welcomed as a steadying hand by the Trump opponents in the Washington foreign policy establishment.

But the appointment raises more questions than answers. Why did he appoint an outspoken military man for the delicate position of coordinator of foreign and security policy? The simple answer seems to be that Mr Trump admires soldiers – he has appointed generals to head the defence and homeland security departments. This bias seems on a par with his ambition for a more powerful military when he has set no clear direction for what the troops and ships might be used for.

More serious is the disconnect between his cabinet appointments – including some experienced veterans of commerce and the military – and the White House ideologues who believe that Mr Trump has a mandate to shake the Washington establishment out of groupthink and dominance by lobbyists and special interests.

Over the past week, Mr Trump’s appointees have sought to reassure allies that he is not going to do what he promised on the campaign trail. Vice president Mike Pence went to the Munich security conference to assure allies of Mr Trump’s commitment to the Nato alliance, even though the president has repeatedly said it was an obsolete Cold War relic. Defence secretary James Mattis flew to Baghdad declaring, “We’re not in Iraq to steal anybody’s oil”, distancing himself from the president’s repeated suggestions that Washington should have taken control of the country’s oil reserves.

Clashes within the Washington bureaucracy are nothing new – they are part of life. The position of national security adviser exists to craft an agreed policy – even if this process takes so long that the moment for action has passed. The office had a staff of 100 during Bill Clinton’s presidency, rising to 400 under Mr Obama, which turned out to be a period of exceptional policy indecision, particularly over Syria.

In time the Trump administration may find a way to bed itself in to Washington power structures. But for the moment, in the words of the historian and commentator Max Boot, Washington “has several foreign policies – and it is not obvious whether anyone, including the president himself, speaks for the entire administration”.

One reason for this is that Mr Trump, as a businessman, is interested in deals, not grand strategy. At one level, the attractiveness of a grand bargain with Russia is that he sees Vladimir Putin as a man cast in the same mould as himself, a chief executive who can take quick action in pursuit of a clear goal. The problem is that Mr Trump is no longer a corporate chief executive but the head of an executive branch governed by a constitution written to restrict Putin-like authoritarian tendencies. So progress is Washington is painstakingly slow.

Another unique aspect of the Trump White House is that the president sees international relations in dollars and cents, rather than in terms of alliances and the need to preserve a precarious stability in the world. This is profoundly disruptive. His America First slogan would, if implemented fully, spark a trade war with China, raise tensions with Mexico, undermine the Nato alliance and alienate the European Union. Finally, with a president who has no history of interest in foreign policy, success in White House battles seems to belong to the person who last spoke to the boss. At the moment, Stephen Bannon, the right-wing agitator who is now White House chief strategist, seems to be the dominant figure, with the experienced cabinet members in a distant orbit.

It may be that this tug of war over foreign policy will continue, leading to paralysis in Washington and confusion abroad. For US allies, the message would be clear: they have to step up and take the lead in decisions where previously they waited for Washington. In that case, the focus will likely be what Mr Trump cares about most – strengthening America’s borders and reversing its ballooning trade deficit, even if it sharpens tensions with friends abroad.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs