The Trumputin trap

Donald Trump is an avowed admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sees himself as a brilliant dealmaker. As he settles in following his inauguration, the newly seated U.S. president will likely be tempted to seek a grand bargain with the Kremlin to transform sour relations between Washington and Moscow into cooperation in the world’s major trouble spots. That could be a terrible mistake with divisive consequences for transatlantic relations.

The United States’ European allies are rightly alarmed at the possibility of a Yalta-style deal that would redraw the Continent’s geopolitics with dire consequences for the European Union and its eastern neighbors. They should use early contacts with the new administration to warn of the bear traps into which an inexperienced leader in a hurry could fall. To make that message more credible, they should also respond constructively to Trump’s demand they spend more for their own defense.

“There is a real danger that a deal with Putin would accelerate the unraveling of the political West and play into Putin’s grand strategy of making Russia great again — indeed, greater than it was under the czars and the commissars,” said Strobe Talbott, a veteran negotiator with Russia who was deputy secretary of state under former Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Trump has repeatedly praised Putin as a smart, strong leader and said he wants to do business with him. In pre-inauguration interviews, he said he wanted an early summit with the Russian leader and could lift U.S. sanctions in return for nuclear arms reductions and assistance from Moscow, notably in combating terrorism. “If you get along and somebody is helping, why would you have sanctions if somebody is doing really great things?” Trump said.

Trump’s pro-Russian comments have been met with alarm in the former Soviet Baltic states and in Poland. The fear from Tallinn to Tbilisi is that Trump could cut a deal with Putin that would sell out the interests of former Soviet countries in the contested gray zone between Russia and NATO, and make the Central and Eastern European states that have joined the Western defense alliance since the fall of the Berlin Wall feel less secure.

Russian President Vladimir Putin | Adam Berry/Getty Images

Some Eastern European diplomats have also compared a potential “Trumputin” pact to the 1944 Yalta conference at which an ailing U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin sketched a post-war security order for Europe, including pledges of self-determination for Eastern European nations that Moscow disregarded.

A sense of rising unease is also tangible in some quarters in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel has led European opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its destabilization of eastern Ukraine — a landgrab that Trump’s declared willingness to drop sanctions for a nuclear arms deal ignores. Alarmingly, in his first interview with a European paper post-election, Trump appeared to equate Putin and Merkel, an important European ally, saying he would trust both of them initially but did not know how long that would last.

“My biggest concern is that Washington is signaling to Russia that it’s OK to meddle in the politics of sovereign nations which are your neighbors,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, a German senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Meddling is going on from Paris to Ukraine, from east to west and north to south, within Europe and at its borders, and always with the intent of undermining the credibility and effectiveness of democratic institutions. And it is being either denied or downplayed.”

Trump’s enthusiasm for the Russian president stands in stark contrast to the vision set out by his incoming secretaries of state and defense in their confirmation hearings, in which both former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson and retired General James Mattis depicted Russia as a threat to the United States and its European allies. They supported maintaining sanctions on Moscow over its actions in Ukraine and described the NATO alliance, which Trump has repeatedly called “obsolete,” as the cornerstone of Western security.

“Finlandization would be the most sensible outcome for Ukraine and Georgia, but it may be too late for that” — Gilles Andreani, a former head of the French foreign ministry’s policy think tank

Russia’s goal in any negotiation would be to get rid of Western sanctions on its financial sector and on the drilling technology it needs if it is to extract more oil and gas from its Arctic reserves. Support for sanctions is waning anyway in Europe, notably in France and Italy, raising doubts about whether they will be rolled over again mid-year.

Moscow wants to halt NATO’s eastward expansion, prevent U.S. missile defense deployments in Central Europe and reverse NATO’s decision to deploy rotating units in the Baltics and Poland in response to its military action in Ukraine. It will also be pushing to end what it sees as U.S.-fomented “color revolutions” in which pro-democracy activists have ousted Kremlin-backed autocrats in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and staged protests in Belarus and Moscow itself.

The Obama administration demanded Moscow stop aiding Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine and allow international monitoring of the Russia-Ukraine border to prevent the flow of weapons and special forces. It wanted to reverse Russia’s nuclear and military buildup in the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, and to end its incursions into European allies’ airspace and coastal waters. It also sought to halt Russian cyberattacks on Western countries, especially after the intelligence findings of Moscow’s hacking of Democratic Party email accounts to help Trump against Hillary Clinton in the presidential race.

How far these priorities may change under Trump is unclear. But the new president evidently aims to stamp his own pizzazz swiftly on global politics by pursuing a deal with Putin that could be compared with former U.S. President Richard Nixon’s opening to China’s Mao Zedong, or former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s agreements with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

In Syria, Trump’s priority will likely be to enlist effective Russian action against Islamic State fighters, rather than to get rid of Assad, who has Russian and Iranian support. He may also seek Putin’s cooperation in reining in Iran’s missile programs, and in containing a rising China, which he sees as Washington’s chief adversary.

But given how far the strategic situation has tilted to Moscow’s advantage in the last three years since Russia seized Crimea, Trump would struggle to obtain much more than a promise to cooperate in areas where the two leaders see a common purpose — most notably the fight against Islamic terrorism.

Putin will likely continue to probe for weakness, exploit frozen conflicts in Russia’s neighborhood and try to keep Europe off balance while avoiding overt actions that would cement Western unity.

Some European analysts, notably in France, contend there is a basis for a U.S.-Russian understanding that would result in the de facto “Finlandization” of the countries between Russia and NATO. During the Cold War, Finland had democratic self-government and a market economy but was officially neutral and favorably disposed to the Soviet Union.

“Finlandization would be the most sensible outcome for Ukraine and Georgia, but it may be too late for that,” said Gilles Andreani, a former head of the French foreign ministry’s policy think tank.

That idea might sit well in some quarters of Paris, but it stirs outrage among Merkel’s conservatives in Berlin, in Central Europe, and indeed in Washington, including among Republican senators, as it would deny former Soviet republics the right to choose their alliances.

“If the U.S. were to acquiesce in a deal that put Ukraine back into a Russian sphere of domination, that in itself would be inexcusable,” said Talbott, who is now president of the Brookings Institution. “It would also be very dangerous, because it would increase the temptation for Putin and others to think that if they can do it with Ukraine, they can do it with the Baltic states.”

“Unlike in 1945, Russia does not have the military forces to occupy and hold territory in Eastern Europe,” said Antonio Missiroli, director of the EU Institute for Security Studies. But Putin will likely continue to probe for weakness, exploit frozen conflicts in Russia’s neighborhood and try to keep Europe off balance while avoiding overt actions that would cement Western unity, he said.

Ultimately, what Putin wants is to be treated as a great power on an equal footing with the U.S. itself. And that means he is unlikely to stop making trouble for Washington and its European allies — no matter what he might agree to on paper.

Paul Taylor writes POLITICO‘s Europe At Large column.