By Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay
After years of rising
U.S.-Russia tensions over Ukraine, Syria, cyber attacks and nuclear arms
control, Donald Trump's election as U.S. president may offer a narrow window to
repair relations as he and Russian President Vladimir Putin size up each other.
But Trump's ascent to the
White House carries the risk of dangerous miscalculation if the U.S.
president-elect and Putin, two willful personalities and self-styled strong
leaders who have exchanged occasional compliments, decide they have misjudged
one another, according to Russia experts and others.
U.S. officials and private
analysts predict that Putin, who has reasserted Moscow's military and political
muscle from eastern Europe to the Middle East, will avoid openly provoking
Trump before he takes office.
"Putin has the ability to
advance his interests in many different ways. Sometimes tactical diplomacy can
help," said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a
Washington think-tank.
"We're in temporary truce
phase," said Hill, who has served as the U.S. national intelligence
officer for Russia and Eurasia in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations
and co-authored a book on Putin.
Michael McFaul, a former U.S.
ambassador to Moscow under President Barack Obama, said Putin likely will wait
to see if he can reach some accommodation with Trump to allow the lifting of
Ukraine-related sanctions imposed by Washington and the European Union that
have contributed to Russia’s growing economic woes.
During the campaign, Trump was
criticized by his Democratic Party rival, Hillary Clinton, for praising Putin
as a strong leader and saying ties with Russia should be improved at a time
when Moscow and Washington are at odds over Syria and Ukraine.
Trump rattled Washington's
European allies with comments questioning NATO's mutual self-defense pledge and
suggesting that he might recognize Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimea
region.
Putin last year called Trump
"a really brilliant and talented person" and the Kremlin said on
Thursday that the U.S. president-elect's foreign policy approach was
"phenomenally close" to that of the Russian leader.
Putin "has a future
president who has expressed a desire to cooperate, who has expressed a desire
to move away from the Obama policies. Why would you screw that up with a
provocation?" asked McFaul, now at Stanford University.
In Syria, a U.S. official
said, Putin appears to be extending a "humanitarian" pause in air
strikes against moderate rebels holding the eastern side of Aleppo to give
Trump an opportunity to affirm the willingness he expressed during the campaign
to seek a more cooperative U.S.-Russian relationship.
"I think they were
holding their fire for the purpose of decreasing the international pressure on
them, and now, like the rest of the world, they may be taking stock of the
current situation," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
But U.S. officials caution
that Russia still may feel compelled to launch more attacks after dispatching a
naval task force led by the aging aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov to the
eastern Mediterranean in a show of force.
CONFLICT IN CYBERSPACE
The U.S. government has
publicly accused Moscow of hacking the Democratic National Committee and other
party organizations during the election campaign, which Russia has denied.
Trump declined to blame Russia, and the Election Day Russian cyber attacks that
some officials feared never materialized.
Trump has not laid out a
detailed Russia policy, and many in his party, including potential top advisors
and cabinet officials, have taken a hawkish view of Moscow.
Former House of
Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally rumored for a senior post,
lambasted in 2014 what he called Obama's weak response to Russia's land-grab in
Ukraine. Putin, Gingrich wrote, is "a ruthlessly determined leader
motivated by nationalism and an imperial drive."
And while there was celebration
in Moscow after Trump's victory over former secretary of state Clinton, who has
been sharply critical of Putin, some Russians cautioned against euphoria.
"The idea that it will be
easier to strike a deal with Trump than Clinton is wrong. ... Everything will
be tested when we get down to business," analyst Vladimir Bruter told the
daily pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda before Tuesday's election.
Some experts and U.S.
officials say there is a high risk of miscalculation or even confrontation,
given Trump's history of taking slights and challenges personally.
"That's actually where
reality is going to intrude," Hill said. "Putin's pretty
thin-skinned, too."
Putin has a penchant for challenging
adversaries, particularly when he senses weakness, and he has long made it
clear that he intends to reassert what he considers Russia's rightful global
role.
Suspending
a treaty with Washington on cleaning up weapons-grade plutonium last month,
Putin listed conditions for resuming Russian participation that amounted to a laundry list of
grievances against the United States.
The
demands included lifting Ukraine-related U.S. economic sanctions, compensating
Moscow for those sanctions and reducing the U.S. military presence in NATO's
eastern European states to the levels of 16 years ago.
Russia's
bedrock concern "is whether they believe the threat of U.S.-promoted
regime change is abating under a President Trump," said Andrew Weiss, vice
president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Everything else is a secondary, lower-order problem."
Putin has
accused the U.S. government of promoting widespread street protests in Russia
following its 2011 elections, as well as the "color revolutions" in
Georgia, Ukraine and elsewhere.
On
specific issues, Weiss said, there are few if any easy opportunities for rapid
U.S.-Russian agreements.
"The
agenda's really threadbare," he said. "We're basically at a
standstill."
(This
version of the story fixes a typo in paragraph two)
(Additional reporting by Andrew Osborn in
Moscow. Editing by John Walcott and Stuart Grudgings.)
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