Putin Emerges Winner In First Meeting With Trump
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Trump got through his first meeting with Putin without any major gaffes, but the Russian president emerged as the winner.
a few observations can be drawn from the reports put out so far. First, Putin emerged as the winner. At a press briefing after the meeting, Tillerson said that Trump did raise—more than once—the charge that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. However, Lavrov told reporters that Trump accepted Putin’s denial. Perhaps Lavrov was exaggerating, but Tillerson did say the two presidents agreed to “move forward” and not “re-litigate the past”—which amounts to the same thing.
In other words, Putin did not, and apparently will not, pay any price for his information-warfare campaign against American democracy. In fact, Tillerson said that Trump merely “noted” the domestic concerns about the charges, which could prove “a substantial hindrance” to future Russian–American relations. That’s very different from pressuring or even endorsing the accusation against Russia, which has been leveled by the entire U.S. intelligence community. Putin must also have noticed that hours before their meeting, Trump again voiced skepticism not only about the accusation but about the general competence of his intelligence agencies, likening their conclusions about Russian hacking to their 2002 warnings about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Tillerson added that the two leaders agreed to create a “framework” for talks on cybersecurity, including a pledge of non-interference in future elections. But this is a smokescreen given Putin’s failure to acknowledge his past activity—and Trump’s failure to press him on it.
Putin and Trump were said to have spent much of their 2 ¼–hour meeting talking about, and agreeing on, a ceasefire in southwest Syria. Tillerson and Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS, have been working on this ceasefire for some time with their Russian and Jordanian counterparts, and if it holds, it could have more far-reaching consequences. But Tillerson acknowledged that many details still need to be worked out: whose security forces enforce the ceasefire; whether this cooperation can be extended to other parts of Syria; what its implications are for a joint fight against ISIS, how long Bashar al-Assad remains in charge (Tillerson said Assad must go, while the Russians have other ideas); and whoever rules Damascus, how a peaceful settlement can be forged in this country of multiple civil and ethnic wars. In short, this ceasefire—which, at best, is temporary and covers only one of the many battles, namely between Assad’s regime and a specific U.S.-backed militia—hardly signals that peace is at hand.
The conflict in Ukraine was also brought up, but in Tillerson’s account, only to the extent that the United States has appointed, at Russia’s urging, a special envoy to the country, namely Kurt Volker, a career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to NATO. If the leaders discussed sanctions, the disposition of Crimea, or a timetable for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Eastern Ukraine, neither Tillerson nor Lavrov said anything about it.
This seemed to be, in some ways then, a serious diplomatic session, or at least as serious as might have been imagined under the strained circumstances. Yet at the same time, Putin’s goals were at once more ambitious and more fully met than Trump’s.
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