Canadian master corporal Byron Greff, age twenty-eight, died in a suicide bombing in Kabul on October 29, 2011. Seventeen months later, British lance corporal Jamie Webb of Manchester, age twenty-four, died from the blast of a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan on March 26, 2013. They were just two of the many hundreds of soldiers from countries allied to the United States who fought and died in Afghanistan to defend it. The Afghan War was the first and only war waged under NATO’s Article 5 collective defense obligation that an attack on one member country was an attack on all its members. That war was triggered, of course, by the attack on President Trump’s hometown on September 11, 2001.
During the course of the NATO combat mission, the total number of dead soldiers in Afghanistan from the United Kingdom was 455, from Canada, 158, from France, 86, and from Germany, 54. Yet Trump was constantly berating NATO allies for not paying more for their own defense, as if their blood spilled on the battlefield had no value.
When Trump visited the NATO headquarters building in Brussels on May 25, 2017, he stood beside the 9/11 memorial at the building, a massive steel beam from one of the World Trade Center’s towers. Trump didn’t mention the hundreds of European soldiers who had died in Afghanistan defending the United States, choosing instead to focus on the twenty-three NATO countries that were “still not paying what they should be paying and what they’re supposed to be paying for their defense. This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States.”
Obama had also pressed NATO countries to pay 2 percent of their GDP for their defense, which few did. Obama pressed behind the scenes, while Trump did it in public, and he often framed the issue as if NATO allies were ripping off the United States. In fact, the 2 percent of GDP was an agreed-upon target for every NATO country to reach by the year 2024. This target had absolutely no effect on US defense spending.*
Trump found it particularly irksome that while the Germans had the second largest economy in the NATO alliance, they ponied up only around 1 percent of their GDP on defense while the United States spent around 4 percent. Trump’s refrain was “Guys, you got to be allies.” In Trump’s view, you were an ally when you started writing checks.
On March 17, 2017, German chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Washington on her first official visit to President Trump. Merkel and Trump did not enjoy the warm relationship that she had enjoyed with Obama, to put it mildly. A year and a half earlier, Trump had attacked Merkel on the campaign trail because she had accepted some million Syrian refugees, saying, “What she’s done in Germany is insane. It is insane. They’re having all sorts of attacks.”
Trump interpreted the Germans’ underspending on defense as if he were a landlord collecting on overdue rent, which drove the Germans nuts. Trump’s staff produced a chart showing that Germany was purportedly $600 billion in arrears. Trump waved the “invoice” at Merkel, who told Trump, “Don’t you understand this is not real?”
The contrast of NATO allies’ support for the United States in Afghanistan and the behavior of the Russians was striking. In March 2018, the top US commander in Afghanistan, General John “Mick” Nicholson, told the BBC that Russian weapons were smuggled to the Taliban and that they “provide some degree of support to the Taliban.” Yet Trump always treated Russian president Vladimir Putin like a peer rather than a pariah who controlled a gangster state that ordered the assassinations of enemies in countries that were close American allies, such as the United Kingdom.
On July 8, 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died from exposure to Novichok, a nerve agent produced by Russia. Sturgess had inadvertently come into contact with the agent as a result of the Russian plot to murder a former Russian spy who was living in England.
The episode produced considerable consternation at the CIA. Agency officials were keenly aware that the Russians had been an adversary of the United States for many decades. The CIA officials noticed that some partner intelligence agencies at other governments did not want to share their intelligence with the agency because—whatever the exact truth of the nature of Putin’s relationship with Trump—these partner agencies simply had to assume the worst: that Trump was somehow in the pocket of Putin who was, after all, a former KGB officer.
Now the Russians had conducted an attack with a nerve agent on the territory of arguably the closest ally of the United States. A CIA official remarked, “Imagine if Iran had conducted that incident: Would it even exist as a country?” The fact that Trump didn’t call out the attack for what it was, a state-sponsored terrorist attack, gave some CIA officials heartburn.
Two days after Sturgess died, Trump told reporters as he was departing for a NATO summit in Brussels and then on to the United Kingdom, “I have NATO. I have the UK, which is in, somewhat, turmoil. And I have Putin. Frankly, Putin may be the easiest of them all. Who would think?”
Who indeed? It was just so much easier to deal with Putin, who invaded neighboring countries, attempted to swing American elections as a matter of routine, and had his political opponents jailed and even killed.
A month earlier, Trump had attended a Group of Seven (G7) summit in Canada of the world’s largest economies. Trump demanded the reinstatement of Russia, which had been pushed out of the group after Putin had seized parts of Ukraine in 2014. This demand was rejected.
At the same time he was bromancing Putin, Trump was dumping on America’s closest allies. As he left the G7 summit on Air Force One, Trump blasted his host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, taking to Twitter to accuse him of making “false statements” about United States–Canada tariff negotiations. Canada was the largest market for American exports, around $360 billion a year. Russia imported only a relatively piffling $12 billion of American exports.
During a breakfast meeting at the opening of the NATO summit on July 11, 2018, Trump made the absurd claim to top NATO officials that “Germany is totally controlled by Russia.” As Trump attacked the Germans, John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, sat nearby looking like he would have preferred to be anywhere else on the planet. Kelly looked down and away from Trump while pursing his lips and shifting his body stiffly.
When she was later asked by reporters about Kelly’s evident discomfort, the White House press secretary Sarah Sanders made what was surely one of the funniest observations ever uttered about the stoic four-star marine general who had helped lead the invasion of Iraq in 2003, saying that Kelly “was displeased because he was expecting a full breakfast and there were only pastries and cheese.”
There was, of course, a time when it was true that the Russians really did control tens of millions of Germans when communist East Germany was a fiefdom of the Soviet Union. It was precisely because of the NATO alliance that stood up to the Soviets that East and West Germany became a unified liberal democracy.
German chancellor Angela Merkel, who was raised in East Germany, jabbed back at Trump, saying, “I have witnessed this myself, that a part of Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union. And I am very happy that we are today unified in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany.”
On a visit to the United Kingdom a day after the NATO summit, Trump turned his guns on another close ally, British prime minister Theresa May, telling a reporter that she was botching Brexit, while praising her main Conservative Party political opponent, Boris Johnson. Trump also dumped on the Muslim mayor of London for his handling of terrorism.
Trump’s berating of American allies while making nice with America’s enemies might have made sense if there were some kind of grand strategic plan behind it, but it was hard to discern one. On May 31, 2018, Trump slapped tariffs on European imports such as steel and aluminum, and the Europeans increased their own retaliatory tariffs on American products such as motorcycles and orange juice. Was a trade war with the European Union, the world’s largest trading bloc, really a smart idea? And playing footsie with Putin achieved what, precisely? The Russian economy was roughly the size of Italy’s. Putin also worked against American interests by interfering in US elections, propped up American enemies such as the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and undercut key American alliances like NATO.
Five days after publicly attacking the Germans for purportedly being controlled by the Russians, Trump met in Finland with Putin for a two-hour meeting that included no other officials. At a press conference in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, standing next to Putin, instead of endorsing the unanimous finding of US intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Trump observed that Putin was “extremely strong and powerful in his denial. . . . He just said it’s not Russia. . . . I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Well, that’s settled then!
For good measure, Trump dumped on his own country, saying, “I think that the United States has been foolish. . . . We’ve all been foolish. . . . We’re all to blame.” In fact, as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation painstakingly revealed, the ones to blame were a small coterie of officers in Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU, acting under the orders of Putin.
Within hours of Trump’s bizarre press conference, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, who oversaw the seventeen American intelligence agencies, released a statement pushing back on Trump, saying, “The role of the Intelligence Community is to provide the best information and fact-based assessments possible for the President and policymakers. We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy.” It was an unusually direct public rebuke from Coats, a longtime conservative Republican. Intelligence officials were delighted that Coats quickly and unequivocally defended their work.
Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community during the transition had sabotaged morale at the CIA during Trump’s first year in office, but agency officials were pleasantly surprised that CIA director Mike Pompeo—who personally could be “a dick” when he dealt with them—had never tried to downplay or politicize the intelligence about Russia, despite the proclivities of Trump, who never seemed to accept the fact that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help him.
By Trump’s second year in office, CIA officials were “numb to the circus” and just kept doing their jobs, according to an agency veteran. But the official also said that Trump had done lasting damage to institutions such as the CIA and the FBI because “more and more American people distrust us because of his campaign of vilification and lies. He has vilified us as exploitative and greedy partisans who do not care about America or Americans, just making a quick and easy buck off the taxpayers or pushing our hidden partisan agendas from within like moles. No one trusts us to make selfless, disinterested decisions for the betterment of America and—most significantly—in service of the Constitution that we dedicate our lives to upholding and defending.”
Trump’s performance in Helsinki was a sobering reminder to the CIA rank and file that Trump was prepared to take the word of a former KGB officer over the careful work of his own intelligence agencies.
When Trump returned from Finland, he encountered intense pushback from both Democrats and Republicans about what he had said in Helsinki. Trump’s favorite national security analyst, Fox News’s retired general Jack Keane, went on television to blast Trump’s press conference with Putin as “stunning and disappointing.”
At a hastily arranged press conference at the White House, Trump said that he had mangled his syntax when he had said he saw no reason why Russia would have tried to interfere in the 2016 election, claiming, “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative. . . . You can put that in. And I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.”
Three days later, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell interviewed Coats at the Aspen Security Forum. In the middle of the interview, a producer handed a note to Mitchell that flagged some breaking news. Mitchell told Coats that Trump had just invited Putin to the White House in the fall. Coats looked so surprised that it appeared like he might have been just pulling Mitchell’s leg. Of course, the director of national intelligence knew that Putin was going to be visiting the White House!
The Aspen audience began to realize that Coats wasn’t joking when he said, “Say that again.”
Coats then added with a soupçon of sarcasm, “Okay. That’s going to be special.”
Trump’s national security team did not share the president’s enthusiasm for Putin. During his confirmation hearings to become defense secretary, Mattis described the Russians as the number one threat to the United States and said that he thought that Putin was seeking to break up the NATO alliance.
In December 2017, the Trump administration rolled out its national security strategy, a key planning document that every president since Ronald Reagan had published to warn about threats to American national security and how best to respond to them. What was most newsworthy about the strategy document, which was overseen by McMaster, was the extent to which it portrayed Russia and China, America’s traditional major state antagonists, as threatening. The document asserted that Russia and China “want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests,” which seemed quite at odds with the president’s own embrace of Russia. The document also described Russian aggression against its neighbors: “With its invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, Russia demonstrated its willingness to violate the sovereignty of states in the region.”
Russia was “using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. . . . The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life,” according to the strategy document. The document went on to link Russia’s “information operations” to a broader campaign to influence public opinion across the globe, noting that its influence campaigns blended covert intelligence operations and false online personas with state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users, or “trolls.” This, of course, was similar to the US intelligence community’s conclusions that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election.
Similarly, before he became Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton had called Putin a “liar” and Russia’s election-meddling in 2016 an “act of war.” Working for Trump, Bolton had moderated his tone on Putin, but clearly he was naturally a skeptic of Putin and his works.
The Trump administration seemed to have two sets of policies about Russia. There was the policy of the administration, which took a fairly hard line on Russia, for instance, expelling sixty Russian diplomats in March 2018 after the Russian government’s attempt to assassinate the former Russian spy in the United Kingdom using the nerve agent. Three months earlier, the Trump administration had also approved some $40 million of arms sales to the Ukrainian government, which was fighting Russian-backed rebels in Eastern Ukraine.
During his last public speech as national security adviser at the Atlantic Council in Washington on April 3, 2018, H. R. McMaster blasted Putin, saying, “He may believe that his aggressive actions— . . . in cyberspace, in the air, and on the high seas—can undermine our confidence, our institutions, and our values. Perhaps he believes that our free nations are weak and will not respond to his provocations. He is wrong.” McMaster added that “we have failed to impose sufficient costs” on Russia for subverting American democracy.
If the Trump administration generally took a tough line on Russia, the president went out of his way to mollycoddle Putin. Two weeks after McMaster’s speech, Trump was watching UN ambassador Nikki Haley on TV when she announced new sanctions on Russia for its support of the Syrian regime, which had once again used chemical weapons against its own people. Trump became incensed and dispatched a White House official to tell reporters that Haley had suffered from “momentary confusion.” Haley shot back on Fox News that she didn’t get confused. The White House official then told the New York Times, “The policy was changed and she wasn’t told about it, so she was in a box.”
When Trump met with Putin at the G20 meeting in late June 2019 in Japan, both leaders had a good laugh about the purported “fake news” outlets in each other’s countries. Russia was one of the most difficult and dangerous countries in the world to operate in for journalists. Trump also jokingly told the former KGB officer not to meddle in the American elections again.
Trump wasn’t the first American leader who thought he could do business with Putin. In 2001, George W. Bush said he found Putin “to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed for a “reset” with Russia during Obama’s first term. Of course, neither Bush nor Clinton was the possible beneficiary of Putin’s efforts to sabotage one of the United States’ core interests: its ability to hold elections free of foreign influence. And Putin remained what he always was, an unreconstructed KGB officer committed to maintaining his authoritarian rule and expanding Russian influence wherever he could, in particular if that would also undermine American interests.