← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
What Putin Hopes to Get at His Helsinki Summit with Trump
00:18:27
Next week, President Trump will travel to Finland to meet with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Susan B. Glasser joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what Putin hopes to achieve at the summit, and how Trump is upending decades of U.S. foreign policy to pursue policies that his closest advisers oppose.
Loading summary
Transcript47 lines
- [00:00]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
As summer draws to a close and the kids go back to school, I know I'm going to want to keep in touch with my kids at a price I can afford. Back to school. Shopping can be a hassle, but your phone plan shouldn't be. That's why I made the switch to Mint Mobile. For a limited time, Mint mobile is offering three months of unlimited premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. So while other parents are sweating overage charges, I have a little bit more room in my budget for cool back to school threads. Say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plan's jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages, Mint Mobile is here to rescue you. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Dish overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month. This year, skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get this new customer offer and your three month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month@mintmobile.com New Yorker that's. That's mintmobile.com New Yorker upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
- [01:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Thursday, July 12th on the Dorothy. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. On Monday, Trump will go to Helsinki for a summit with Vladimir Putin that many in his party and administration have been dreading.
- [01:37]
Donald Trump
He's a competitor, you know. Somebody was saying, is he an enemy? He's not my enemy. Is he your friend? No, I don't know him well enough. But the couple of times that I've gotten to meet him, we got along very well. You saw that. I hope we get along well. I think we get along well. But ultimately, he's a competitor. He's representing Russia. I'm representing the United States.
- [02:01]
Dorothy Wickenden
Susan Glasser joins me to discuss the fallout from the NATO meeting in Brussels, what Putin hopes to achieve at the summit, and how Trump is upending decades of US Foreign policy to pursue a strategy that his closest advisors cautioned against. Susan, welcome.
- [02:20]
Susan Glasser
Thank you so much.
- [02:21]
Dorothy Wickenden
Dorothy, let's start by having you give us your assessment of what happened in Brussels.
- [02:30]
Susan Glasser
Well, what happened in Brussels, as they say. It probably won't stay in Brussels, but was very much designed, I think, by President Trump with the audience of President Putin in mind. You know, he has had a consistent pattern of attacking, tweaking, criticizing, even in very personal terms, America's allies, while at the same time speaking very admiringly, as you know, of adversaries or would be adversaries like Putin, like China's Xi Jinping, Turkey's Erdogan. And, you know, I think setting up the summit meeting with Putin by punching your allies in the nose is not a strategy that any other American president would have pursued, to say the least.
- [03:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
There's this personal animosity between Trump and Angela Merkel. And as we heard, Trump opened the meeting in Brussels with this just all out attack on Germany.
- [03:28]
Susan Glasser
Well, it's fascinating, right? Like first of all, the attack on Germany. He specifically said Germany was bought and paid for by Russia because of a pending natural gas pipeline that will bring Russian gas to Germany and further increase German dependence on Russian energy supplies. Which is a fascinating argument. Right. So a lot of people talked about, is it projection on Trump's part that actually he's the one who's worried about being criticized for being in Russia's pocket, so he projects that onto Germany. You know, Angela Merkel is one of the few world leaders who's pretty consistently stood up to Trump. Not in a confrontational way. She's almost the opposite. Confrontational. But Merkel, she has almost a Hillary Clinton like quality, which he clearly seems averse to.
- [04:19]
Dorothy Wickenden
One of them being the female sex.
- [04:21]
Susan Glasser
Right. The gender alone might be, but, you know, look, he's not exactly been a great partner of Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, but he's not been as personally hostile toward May as Merkel. Merkel really rubs him the wrong way. She stood up to him more after the disastrous NATO meetings last year. In 2017, Merkel gave a widely cited speech in which she said, basically, hey, Europe may not be able to count on partners like the US Anymore. Her message there was pretty unmistakable.
- [04:55]
Dorothy Wickenden
She also had a great comeback to his criticism of her being in the pocket of Russia.
- [05:01]
Susan Glasser
Well, yeah, she said, hey, I know what it's like to be dominated by Russia. I grew up in East Germany. Message being very clear. Don't you lecture me, Donald Trump, about what it is to be under Russia's thumb.
- [05:17]
Dorothy Wickenden
How did the Putin summit come about? Take us back to where this all got started.
- [05:21]
Susan Glasser
Well, you know, I've been reporting on this for my New Yorker column over the last few months. I've just I've been sort of obsessed with it, frankly, because it didn't get a lot of attention. Remarkably, this was Donald Trump's own invitation to Vladimir Putin back in March when Putin secured re election to another six year term as Russia's president. Remember the famous do not congratulate phone call?
- [05:45]
Dorothy Wickenden
Yes.
- [05:46]
Susan Glasser
That understandably got an enormous amount of attention. It came right in the midst of Trump's massive shakeup of his foreign policy team. But what didn't get a lot of attention was that on this phone call, Donald Trump invited Vladimir Putin not only to meet face to face for a summit, but he even said, why don't you come to the White House? And the White House did not acknowledge this right away in their readout of the phone call. But just a few days later, amid escalating tensions over the Russian poisoning of a former Russian spy in Great Britain, Russia put out the news. Well, hey, the US might be kicking our diplomats out, but Vladimir Putin just was invited to the White House the other day by Donald Trump himself. And then came Trump's obsession with the North Korea summit and lots of other diplomatic or undiplomatic initiatives like the trade war. And so it kind of kept getting lost in the shuffle. But I kept picking on the thread of this, reporting this out. And what I heard was that his own advisers were very reluctant to follow through on it, but that Trump was demanding this meeting with Putin. And then Putin started sending envoys here to Washington and other Western capitals, basically making the case for a one on one meeting, saying why it was so necessary.
- [07:09]
Dorothy Wickenden
Right now, Trump's critics like to say that he's wildly erratic, but in some fundamental ways, he's really pretty consistent. So during his presidential campaign, and this gets back to what you were saying a few moments ago, I think 50 Republican national security advisers signed that letter condemning him for his ignorance and his recklessness. They pointed out too, he persistently compliments our adversaries and threatens our allies and friends. So we do know this about Donald Trump. He doesn't have that many moves in his playbook. Does anyone in Washington think this is the right direction for US Foreign policy?
- [07:47]
Susan Glasser
Well, you know, Dorothy, I often say it's like Trump is often shocking, but he's rarely surprising. In particular on foreign policy, he loves one on one meetings. He's been obsessed with Putin from the very beginning. He invariably praises what he perceives to be strength. In others, he's been critical of NATO. He called it obsolete. During the campaign, he often has a suspicion of, of allies and free trade as ripping us off. These are consistent themes that go all the way back to his first comments about world affairs back in the 1980s.
- [08:24]
Dorothy Wickenden
So, Susan, what is Trump's vision of American influence and power in the world? On some level, it feels very undemocratic.
- [08:35]
Susan Glasser
Undemocratic small D as well as power, capital D. Yes. I think that he really, unlike previous modern presidents in both parties, Trump sees the world in sort of great power terms. He wouldn't articulate it that way, obviously. He's no Kissinger, but he kind of believes in a 19th century, realpolitik world where the big tough guys, Russia, China, and the United States would get together and carve up the world to their liking and do things where power dominates, where economic muscle, political muscle, and military muscle give you the right to do as you want in the world, at least in your sphere of influence. And that's very much like Vladimir Putin's worldview.
- [09:28]
Dorothy Wickenden
And it's sort of rule by provocation with both friends and enemies. It seems he issues dire threats to see if he can scare whatever interlocutor he has at the time into caving. And sometimes it seems to work, at least initially, as it did with Kim Jong Un, whom he did bring to the negotiating table.
- [09:49]
Susan Glasser
Well, you know, even that, I think, frankly, even that phrase is like a proof of Trump's success. It's spinning us all. He didn'tbringing Kim to the negotiating table. That's something that Kim and his father and grandfather before him have desired of, of the last four, at least, American presidents, and they have refused to grant the Kim regime in North Korea a personal meeting with the President of the United States. In the absence of concrete and verifiable steps towards denuclearization, Trump just handed that concession to them. And it's a testament to his brilliant ability as a political spin artist that he's given credit for doing that.
- [10:34]
Katie Drummond
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that. That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable Faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me. One day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [11:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
You were living in Moscow when Putin first came to power in 2005. At that time, the Western allies seemed generally hopeful that despite his aggressive posturing, he'd be a reform oriented leader. What was the mood in Moscow at the time?
- [12:03]
Susan Glasser
You know, there was a real uncertainty. He was the quintessential gray man, the former KGB agent at the time. Many people here in Washington thought still that he might be kind of a Western oriented reformer, certainly not a liberal. But there was a genuine dispute over what kind of trajectory Putin would take Russia on. And, you know, he quickly consolidated power, eliminated fledgling democratic institutions that had taken shape in the 1990s. And, you know, he saw his mission as it turned out to rectify what he saw as the disastrous collapse of the Soviet Union. He called the breakup of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century in 2004. And for me, that's always been kind of, kind of the signal. Vladimir Putin statement about his mission and.
- [12:57]
Dorothy Wickenden
What does he hope to achieve at the summit?
- [13:00]
Susan Glasser
Isn't that a great question? Putin wants Russia more than anything to be taken seriously, to restore its status as a great power in the world. Which goes back to my point about why he sees the breakup of the Soviet empire essentially as this enormous calamity that it's his mission in politics to. Right. And so in that context, I think he's been really isolated on the world stage since he invaded Ukraine and took over Crimea in 2014. And so he's looking for a way back to international respectability.
- [13:38]
Dorothy Wickenden
Yes, and it's also why he loathes NATO so much, which is all the Western powers ganging up against Russia, as he sees it.
- [13:48]
Susan Glasser
Well, as he sees it, that is no doubt the big narrative of grievance that Putin is likely to begin. His meeting with Donald Trump. That is how Putin, by the way, has begun all of his private meetings with the last three American presidents, is talking about NATO. He's done that with George W. Bush, he's done it with Barack Obama. He did it with Bill Clinton. And I'm sure that he will do it with Donald Trump as well.
- [14:15]
Dorothy Wickenden
And do you think he has specific items that he wants to get Trump to agree to? You know, the end of sanctions? What might that look like?
- [14:24]
Susan Glasser
Well, that's the fear factor here among Trump's advisors. Clearly, Putin would love to have sanctions lifted against Russia. He would love to be welcomed back into the world community. Trump, remember, has already volunteered unilaterally. He'd love to reinvite Putin Back to the G7 meeting of major industrial powers, which, by the way, the United States is the one that led the way in kicking Russia out of the G8 in response to Crimea. So Trump has already signaled a willingness to be open to Putin proposals. Today in Brussels, at his press conference, at the end of that sort of disastrous NATO summit, Trump said he would consider ending NATO exercises, military exercises in the Baltics, if Putin asked for it at the summit.
- [15:15]
Dorothy Wickenden
Some months ago, Trump fired his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and his national security adviser, HR McMaster, replacing them with Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, both of them hardliners on foreign policy. But do you see any of them have any effect on Trump's desires?
- [15:33]
Susan Glasser
You know, isn't it amazing? You know, on Russia, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo couldn't have spoken in tougher terms about Vladimir Putin and about the Russians. And here they have this president who has ordered them to make nice to Putin, who's given them two weeks to put on a summit with this huge potential consequences, nobody knowing if Trump will go into the room alone and trade away every policy priority that Mike Pompeo and John Bolton or hold dear. Trump remains kind of a party of one, at least on Russia, when it comes to foreign policy. There are areas where he's more closely aligned, seemingly, with Bolton and Pompeo, things like getting tough on Iran, blowing up the Iran deal. That's something that both Bolton and Pompeo supported actively.
- [16:20]
Dorothy Wickenden
What about the trade war, which is another big issue looming?
- [16:24]
Susan Glasser
Both Pompeo and Bolton are free traders, Republican Party. That was a core part of their doctrine from, you know, well before the Reagan era on. And so, you know, of course, they weren't advocating the launching of a trade war, as far as one can tell, but they have gone along for the ride with Trump. And not only that, but because Trump fired McMaster and Tillerson and made very clear that outright disagreeing, even in private with his policy priorities was not welcome. I think you now have a situation where even though they may disagree with him, they are clearly much more averse to Directly pushing back against Trump.
- [17:04]
Dorothy Wickenden
I'm keeping you from a piece which you're writing as we speak about all of this. And I wonder, what are the national security types you're talking to telling you about the near term effects of Singapore, Brussels and Helsinki?
- [17:20]
Susan Glasser
Well, I do think there's a direct line from Singapore to Helsinki that Trump was so enamored of this photo op summit with Kim Jong Un. You know, he was swooning over him and seemed heedless of the fact that he didn't really get any kind of a deal. He was even bragging about his all the publicity that he got at the Singapore summit the other night, according to reports that emerged from the Brussels private dinner with all the NATO leaders. Right. This is his great achievement. And it was after that, according to my reporting, that Trump returned to Washington and basically said, okay, I'm tired with this hemming and hawing over the Putin summit. Do it, make it happen. And I talked with one senior administration official after the North Korea summit who said basically there's no stopping him when it comes to setting up this Putin meeting. The President wants to meet with Putin. He's going to meet with Putin. At the time, this was only a few weeks ago, the adviser said the strategy for Pompeo and Bolton was at least let's not fight them on the summit, but let's try to have a real policy agenda and let's put it off as long as we can. They failed on both counts going into this. There is no policy agenda that has been agreed upon or agenda for the summit that's been agreed upon with the Russians. There was just one trip there. Any of the normal summit preparation, either with the Russians or inside the US Government has not happened. There's been no Principals Committee meeting on Russia of the National Security Council since Bolton took office. They are not prepared to do anything other than have Trump show up and wing it with Vladimir Putin.
- [19:04]
Dorothy Wickenden
And perhaps as he promises to raise the issue of Russian interference with the.
- [19:09]
Susan Glasser
Election, well, you know, frankly, who cares if it raises the issue? There's, you know, that seems like one of those silly media kind of finger pointing type things. There's no policy outcome he's demanding. You know, it's not exactly like high level symmetry to say, don't do that bad thing. In the past, we had meaningful arms control negotiations even with the Soviet Union that lasted over decades. Even at times when there was major, even shooting war hostility between proxies of the two countries. Now we're barely on speaking terms. There's no meaningful day to day interaction or working on mutual problems that people can discern. And it's not really a substantive agenda that's worth bringing the leaders of the United States and Russia together for, just to have them say, well, gee, we shouldn't interfere in each other's elections.
- [20:07]
Dorothy Wickenden
Thanks so much, Susan.
- [20:09]
Susan Glasser
It's going to be an incredible few days, Dorothy.
- [20:12]
Dorothy Wickenden
It is. You'll have lots to write about next week, too.
- [20:16]
Susan Glasser
And on and on and on.
- [20:19]
Dorothy Wickenden
Susan Glaser is a staff writer and the author of Kremlin, Vladimir Putin and the End of Revolution. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. This podcast is produced by Alex Barron and Hannah Wilentz. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [20:53]
David Remnick
Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [21:24]
Susan Glasser
From PRX.