Putin, profit and peace: How Trump went from American eagle to cooing pigeon
'It's bewildering,' says Peter Tesch, Australia's former ambassador to Moscow. 'Of course it fuels conspiracy theories that Putin has something over Trump.
'But I don't know why Trump goes to water every time he encounters Putin. He's enthralled. Putin turns Trump the bully into this cowed, servile individual. You see it time and time again. The man who said that we have to put an end to the killing has now accepted that killing should continue.
'The sight of American troops on their knees literally rolling out the red carpet for Putin in front of a plane with the word 'Russia' emblazoned on it really tells you where the true balance of power lies.'
Even worse for US credibility, Trump gave the Russian dictator, a pariah in the West, a precious political gift. A professor of strategic studies at Scotland's University of St Andrews, Phillips P. O'Brien, observes: 'Trump has begun the process of normalising relations with war criminal Putin.' It was the first meeting between a US leader and a Russian one in four years. Putin has been invited in from the cold.
Trump went further. He also appears to have given Putin geopolitical gold. Trump said that, instead of a ceasefire, the US and Russia would now 'go for' a full peace agreement. The Fox News interviewer Sean Hannity put to Trump: 'Most people think this ends with some land swaps ... and what Ukraine wants and needs desperately is a security measure that won't be NATO-related. Is that how this ends?'
Trump: 'Those are points that we negotiated and points that we largely have agreed upon. I think we have agreed on a lot ... Ukraine has to agree to it, maybe they'll say no.' O'Brien's interpretation: 'So Trump has largely agreed on land swaps with Putin and now [Ukrainian president Volodomyr] Zelensky needs to act. Go ahead Ukraine – time for you to commit suicide!'
Zelensky is bound to reject the suicide option. He's travelling to the White House to meet Trump and taking along a European cheer squad. The leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Finland and the European Union will join the negotiation.
But while they're supporting Ukraine, their interests are not identical to Ukraine's. The British and European leaders want Ukraine to emerge from the war sovereign and intact, but they also want to keep Trump committed to the NATO alliance. This means that 'Ukraine's fate is hostage to the wider security negotiation with Europe,' as Peter Tesch puts it.
We are still left to wonder how Putin turned the fierce American eagle into a cooing pigeon in just a few hours. And we have a clue. Although the news coverage largely overlooked it, while the leaders were meant to talk peace, they also talked profit.
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Putin's entourage included Russia's big-money man, Kirill Dmitriev, chief executive of Russia's sovereign wealth fund. He said after the summit that 'it's very important that President Trump outlined the significant economic potential of co-operation between the US and Russia'.
Putin seemed pretty keen, too. 'It's clear,' he said, 'that US and Russian investment and business cooperation has tremendous potential. Russia and the US can offer each other so much.'
Trump needed no convincing. He volunteered to the press: 'We also have some tremendous Russian business representatives here. And I think you know, everybody wants to deal with us. We've become the hottest country anywhere in the world in a very short period of time. And we look forward to dealing. We're going to try and get this over with.' Get what 'over with'? He seems to have been referring to the Ukraine negotiations.
This casts Trump's agenda in a different light. Putin may be waging a 'disgusting' war. Trump wants to make a killing of a different sort. He went into the meeting threatening to cut off Putin's petrodollars and came out wanting some of them instead.
The Russian president's final remark at the post-summit press conference was the only time he used English. Just four words, spoken with an impish grin: 'Next time in Moscow.'
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