WALKING AWAY AGAIN

THERE WERE RISKS IN GIVING UKRAINE TOMAHAWKS BUT THEY WERE MANAGEABLE. TRUMP SHOULD HAVE AGREED AND STOOD UP TO PUTIN

The moment I heard that the president had enjoyed another “productive” phone call and would meet Vladimir Putin in Budapest I knew that the rumored discussions about granting Ukraine access to Tomahawk missiles were dead.  We have been through this before, how many times now, and witnessed once more hopeful policy choices with respect to Ukraine get rolled back, a rubbery Mr. Trump  buckling.  If Putin was on the line we knew that as soon as the phone settled back in its cradle.

Legions of talking heads in he US have persisted in describing the so-called manipulative skills of Putin, the man behind a powerful cocktail of psychological weapons wielded devilishly, thanks to the superlative training he received as a young KGB officer.  Well, I have news for you: the number of KGB officers, and I have known many over the years, who had quality manipulation skills capable of turning and recreating human behavior is near zero.  No, this is not and never has been about a superior mind overpowering President Trump.  It is about Putin’s recognition of a vulnerability, and acting on it, exploiting a narcissistic American president.  Putin is just another clever guy who knows how to play a man who thinks only of himself.

In his youth Putin was a thug in then Leningrad, in trouble with the law and on the streets, dealing with an awful family and an abusive father.  Later, as a KGB Major or Lt. Colonel he was marginal in his abilities according to his superiors, at least one of whom is now living the United States as a defector, criticized as too quick to take foolish risks.  He was assigned to East Germany, not exactly a priority intelligence target, as it was then a country shackled, cuffed and subordinate to the powerful  Soviet Union, hardly a prized assignment in the KGB.  No, Mr. Putin is not a dynamo, but a guy who was cunning, had a finely developed sense of timing, and who happened to be in the right place at the right time as the drunken Boris Yeltsin looked around for someone to take the reins, first in Saint Petersburg and then in Moscow, while Yeltsin descended into an alcohol-clouded end.

But there is a great and dramatic irony at work here. Trump’s absence of strength is chiefly on stage when it comes to dealing with the reincarnated czar; Trump is fanatical and tenacious when it comes to vengeful pursuit of political enemies, or eliminating  programs associated with the Democratic Party, or subjecting blue cities to needless National Guardsmen, or to exercise power for the sheer sake of it, like pardoning or commuting the sentences of undeserving convicts, or robbing the middle class to enrich the wealthy, then Trump is determined, focused and single minded.  Where there has been a criticism or attack on him personally he is predictably vicious and unrelenting.  Vacillation is almost unique to the inscrutable relationship with Putin, and the many dark and unproven theories behind it.

Again, in the phone call the other day, Trump appeared as putty in Putin’s hands, a sucker for flattery and Putin’s appeals to his vanity.  Trump has no sense of the classical themes that guided the founders or our great presidents, no concept of the prodigious national dignity of Ukraine; no sense of the human grandeur in achieving national priorities or the hard-earned standing of our nation in history or on the world stage.  The dominant driver is almost always to be the central player, to fashion his legacy as the author of another mythical peace agreement, to add to the eight other “wars’ he risibly claims to have settled.

No, most of us “back alley Cold War warriors” from an earlier generation that struggled against a different version of Russia never expected Trump to seize the opportunity to strengthen Ukraine militarily, politically, morally, and to make good with Europe’s growing fears.  Trump’s  temporary flirtation with statesmanship, an admittedly counterintuitive but never-to-be-denied hope, has crash-landed again.