If elected, would Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin’s man
in the White House? This should be a ludicrous, outrageous question. After all,
he must be a patriot — he even wears hats promising to make America great
again.
But we’re talking about a ludicrous, outrageous
candidate. And the Trump campaign’s recent behavior has quite a few foreign
policy experts wondering just what kind of hold Mr. Putin has over the
Republican nominee, and whether that influence will continue if he wins.
I’m not talking about merely admiring Mr. Putin’s
performance — being impressed by the de facto dictator’s “strength,” and
wanting to emulate his actions. I am, instead, talking about indications that
Mr. Trump would, in office, actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy, at the
expense of America’s allies and her own self-interest.
That’s not to deny that Mr. Trump does, indeed, admire
Mr. Putin. On the contrary, he has repeatedly praised the Russian strongman,
often in extravagant terms. For example, when Mr. Putin published an article
attacking American exceptionalism, Mr. Trump called it a “masterpiece.”
But admiration for Putinism isn’t unusual in Mr.
Trump’s party. Well before the Trump candidacy, Putin envy on the right was
already widespread.
For one thing, Mr. Putin
is someone who doesn’t worry about little things like international law when he
decides to invade a country. He’s “what you call a leader,” declared Rudy Giuliani after Russia invaded
Ukraine.
It’s also clear that the people who gleefully chanted
“Lock her up” — not to mention the Trump adviser who called for Hillary
Clinton’s execution — find much to admire in the way Mr. Putin deals with his
political opponents and critics. By the way, while the Secret Service is
investigating the comments about executing Mrs. Clinton, all the
Trump campaign had to say was that it “does not agree with those statements.”
And many on the right also seem to have a strange,
rather creepy admiration for Mr. Putin’s personal style. Rush Limbaugh, for
example, declared that while talking to President Obama, “Putin probably had
his shirt off practicing tai chi.”
All of this is, or should be, deeply disturbing; what
would the news media be saying if major figures in the Democratic Party
routinely praised leftist dictators? But what we’re now seeing from Mr. Trump
and his associates goes beyond emulation, and is starting to look like
subservience.
First, there was the Ukraine issue — one on which
Republican leaders have consistently taken a hard line and criticized Mr. Obama
for insufficient action, with John McCain, for example, accusing the president of “weakness.” And
the G.O.P. platform was going to include a statement reaffirming this line, but
it was watered down to blandness on the insistence of Trump representatives.
Then came Mr. Trump’s interview with The New York Times, in which, among other things, he declared that even
if Russia attacked members of NATO he would come to their aid only if those
allies — which we are bound by treaty to defend — have “fulfilled their obligations
to us.”
Now, some of this is Mr. Trump’s deep ignorance of
policy, his apparent inability to understand that you can’t run the U.S.
government the way he has run his ramshackle business empire. We know from many
reports about his stiffing of vendors, his history of profiting from
enterprises even as they go bankrupt, that he sees contracts as suggestions,
clear-cut financial obligations as starting points for negotiation. And we know
that he sees fiscal policy as no different; he has already talked about renegotiating U.S.
debt. So why should we
be surprised that he sees diplomatic obligations the same way?
But is there more to the story? Is there some specific
channel of influence?
We do know that Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign
manager, has worked as a consultant for various
dictators, and was for years
on the payroll of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president and a Putin
ally.
And there are reasons to wonder about Mr. Trump’s own
financial interests. Remember, we know nothing about the true state of his
business empire, and he has refused to release his taxes, which might tell us
more. We do know that he has substantial if murky involvement with
wealthy Russians and Russian businesses. You might say that these are
private actors, not the government — but in Mr. Putin’s crony-capitalist
paradise, this is a meaningless distinction.
At some
level, Mr. Trump’s motives shouldn’t matter. We should be horrified at the
spectacle of a major-party candidate casually suggesting that he might abandon
American allies — just as we should be horrified when that same candidate
suggests that he might welsh on American financial obligations. But there’s
something very strange and disturbing going on here, and it should not be
ignored.
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