What America might want from Russia, but is unlikely to get

FOR decades, Russian leaders insisted that America had no claim to moral superiority. For every Soviet and post-Soviet misdeed, from labour camps to invasions, they adduced an American counterpart. Such equivalence was anathema to American statesmen, who claimed to abide by higher standards.

Until now. In an interview with President Donald Trump broadcast on February 5th, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News described Vladimir Putin as a “killer”. A nod from Mr Trump seemed to allow that this might be the case, which would in itself have been an arresting evaluation of another head of state. The president then went on to say that there were “a lot of killers” and to question whether his own country was “so innocent”. His tough-talk tarnishing of America’s reputation was unprecedented. But the equivalence it posits sits easily with the way Mr Trump seems to see Mr Putin’s Russia: as a potential partner.

In 2016 Mr Trump was consistently effusive about Mr Putin—“very smart!”—contrasting his popularity among Russians favourably with Barack Obama’s standing in American polls. He poured scorn on evidence that the Kremlin was behind the hacking of Democratic bigwigs’ e-mails during the election campaign, preferring to denigrate America’s intelligence agencies. Kompromat or collusion have been suggested as possible explanations for this unshakable warmth. Official inquiries—if they are allowed to proceed—may shed light on claims that Mr Trump’s campaign team collaborated with Moscow.

Scattered comments by the president and his aides imply an alternative explanation: the administration envisages a grand diplomatic bargain with Russia that encompasses arms control, counter-terrorism, the status of Crimea, economic sanctions and relations with China, an arrangement in which the two leaders indomitably face down all comers like some maverick geopolitical wrestling team.

This stance does not just go against the views of those Republicans who, along with much of America’s foreign-policy establishment, regard Mr Putin as a gangster. It also contradicts Mr Trump’s two predecessors. Mr Obama blithely wrote Russia off as an irksome regional power, nuclear-armed and prone to harassing its neighbours but doomed to decline into irrelevance. George W. Bush, who on meeting Mr Putin professed to have looked into his soul and to have liked what he saw, later oscillated between symbolic protests against the Kremlin’s depredations and fitful efforts to ignore them.

This all means that any bargain will face opposition in Congress and quite possibly even in Mr Trump’s cabinet. Still, public opinion provides an opening: polls suggest Mr Putin is viewed more favourably, and his country less warily, than before Mr Trump embraced him.In Russia state propaganda has burnished Mr Trump’s image and soothed anti-Americanism.

In terms of style, the putative tag team looks rather well matched. Neither is fond of the liberal, rules-based global order. Both can lie without blushing. It is easy to imagine Mr Trump sharing Mr Putin’s approach to diplomacy, too. Like the Russian, he seems sure to prefer bilateral deals to messy supranational bodies and is likely to define America’s national interest in narrowly military and commercial terms. Both men seem willing to link disparate issues and regions in a general barter. Neither is much exercised by human rights. Both regard the humiliation of adversaries as a salutary exercise of power.

Buttering up the butcher

Yet as a means to further Mr Trump’s avowed goals in the Middle East and elsewhere the idea has three deep flaws. One is the damage it would do to America’s existing alliances and international reputation. The second lies in the immutable realities of great-power relations, underpinned by history and geography that no deal-making can wholly negate. The last is that Mr Trump seems to be making a classic presidential beginner’s mistake in dealing with the Kremlin, one that Mr Bush committed when looking for a soul and that Mr Obama made when he attempted a “reset” in relations with Russia in 2009: wishful thinking.

The first thing Mr Trump seems to want is an ally against the so-called Islamic State (IS). His notion that Russian forces have been battling IS in Syria is mistaken: they have mostly bombed other opponents of Bashar al-Assad, Mr Putin’s client. But that could change—especially, observes Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, now that Mr Assad’s own position in Damascus looks more secure.

What, though, could Russia offer? Mr Putin’s way of war, in Aleppo as in Grozny, makes use of indiscriminate bombardment and deliberate targeting of civilians; Russian air power might thus be used against Raqqa and other IS strongholds in ways that American aircraft cannot. But even if that were acceptable, it would hardly be a solution. It is only by occupying territory that IS can be beaten; and Russia offers little by way of boots on the ground.

Russia has no need for ground troops in Syria because its forces are in de facto alliance with those of Hizbullah and Iran. This throws into sharp relief differences between America and Russia on who counts as a terrorist. Mindful of Russia’s 20m Muslims, Mr Putin has been as tactful as was Mr Obama in separating the concepts of Islam and terrorism. He has said the Orthodox church can be seen as having more in common with Islam than with Catholicism, and that “Islam is an outstanding element of Russia’s cultural make-up, an organic part of our history.” His grotesque satrap in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, enforces sharia (Islamic law) there.

Beyond Mr Putin’s awkward mix of brutality, cynicism and cultural pragmatism, there is the problem that a Syrian settlement palatable to the White House, let alone America’s Sunni Arab partners—whose support would be crucial for any forces actually taking territory from IS—would have to see Iran’s influence minimised. But Russia would be very hard put to acquiesce in such a plan. Its relationship with Iran, while testy, is more nuanced than the White House seems to realise.

Iran is Russia’s neighbour across the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus. The two vie for influence there and in Central Asia. Because an Iranian nuclear bomb would threaten Russia’s primacy in the region, Russia was happy to take a role in the deal that constrained Iran’s nuclear programme. But proximity also makes Mr Putin wary about antagonising the Iranians. As Nikolay Kozhanov of the European University at St Petersburg says, the Russians have interests at stake that the Americans do not, including energy projects and pipelines in and around the Caspian. They want to sell Iran arms, including surface-to-air-missiles and civilian nuclear power plants; they need to co-operate with Iran to keep Mr Assad in power. They are very unlikely to want to tear up the nuclear deal, something Mr Trump has threatened.

On a bigger scale, the same factors—geography, security and commerce—would nobble any bid by Mr Trump to conscript Russia as a bulwark against China. The civility he has conspicuously extended to Mr Putin has not applied to Xi Jinping, whom Mr Trump angered over Taiwan even before he took office. As Dimitri Simes of the Centre for the National Interest, a think-tank, notes, American diplomats have worried about Sino-Russian cosiness for decades. Stephen Bannon, Mr Trump’s influential strategist, undoubtedly sees China as a major adversary. A bid to realign the three powers lies at the heart of Mr Trump’s grand bargain.

This may be even less realistic than the hope of turning Russia against Iran. China and Russia are hardly close allies. Among other reasons for mistrust, the old Russian anxiety over Chinese expansion in Siberia, a fear stoked by the lopsided populations on either side of the Amur river, has never gone away. But Mr Putin began a pivot towards Asia in the mid-2000s, well before Mr Obama undertook his own version of such a manoeuvre. Initially a feint as much as a strategy, one conceived as a response to what Mr Putin saw as Western hostility, it has since acquired substance. Alexander Lukin, of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, sees it as “largely irreversible”. When Western sanctions over Russia’s incursions into Ukraine in 2014 began to bite, China became a valuable source of credit. It has invested in Russian oil-and-gas firms; Russia sells it high-tech weapons.

Other benefits America might seek in a grand bargain include a reduction of Russia’s campaign of bullying and destabilisation in the Baltic states and movement on arms control. Here, again, the scope for progress is narrow. A deal on long-range nuclear weapons which limits both countries to 1,550 deployed warheads is set to expire in 2021. Mr Trump could extend it, or try to reduce that cap; he might also want to do something about Russia’s huge numerical advantage in tactical nuclear weapons. But America’s missile-defence capabilities—which Russia sees as a threat to its deterrence—would be dragged into any such negotiations, and the missile-defence facilities in Europe are there to deal with Iran. A deal which reduced their capability should—at least in a normal world, and assuming Congress is not wholly supine—be hard for Mr Trump to swallow, or sell.

The bear’s necessities

In much of this, Mr Trump seems to overestimate Russia’s clout as well as its alignment with his goals. He mistakes the strut of a bully for the swagger of a superpower. The “strength” he admires relies on strategic assets handed down from the Soviet past—its Security Council seat and nuclear weapons—and its hydrocarbon reserves, bolstered by Mr Putin’s knack for asymmetric thuggery. Unrestrained by allies, scruple or domestic opposition, he is a dab hand at disinformation and discrediting critics whom he does not dispose of in other ways. But his Russia is more of a prickly, meddling power than a global, transformative one. Diplomatic isolation and an economy throttled by corruption frustrate any grander ambitions.

Russia can, however, seize an opportunity; and Mr Trump presents it with one, whatever role Mr Putin had in his rise to power. (While Mr Trump did not take the intelligence regarding Russian hacking seriously, Mr Putin evidently did. Several officers of Russia’s federal security service have been arrested for treason in what may be a hunt for a cyber-mole. A senior Kremlin insider was found dead, supposedly of a heart attack.)

Relief on sanctions is the most obvious item on the Kremlin’s agenda for Mr Trump’s presidency, one that would have the double effect of helping Russia’s economy and dividing America’s allies. But other things may matter to Mr Putin more. Obligingly, Channel One, Russia’s main state television channel, provided a list of them a few days after Mr Trump’s inauguration—a list which sounded rather more achievable than Mr Trump’s objectives.

First was that anti-terror alliance, for “nothing brings [countries] together as much as a fight against a common enemy.” Second, Russia wants to stop any further expansion of NATO after the accession of Montenegro. Countries barred might well include Sweden or Finland, and would definitely include Ukraine. Mr Trump’s description of NATO as “obsolete” has been welcome. If Russia were to meddle in its Baltic neighbours, cabinet members who profess devotion to the alliance, such as Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, and James Mattis, the secretary of defence, might struggle to persuade Mr Trump to honour the commitment to mutual defence at its core. If he did not, NATO would in effect be dead: the ultimate prize for Mr Putin.

Third on Channel One’s list was the recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, along with a de-facto veto over Ukraine’s future. The Kremlin wants to retain its grip on the country’s wretched east—where fighting has flared up again—and so secure a stranglehold on its policies (see article). Conversely, America and its partners have insisted on a withdrawal of Russian troops, the re-establishment of Ukraine’s control of its borders, and regional elections monitored by international observers.

Here, on the face of it, the signs are not encouraging for Mr Putin. Mr Tillerson affirmed in his confirmation hearing that the annexation of Crimea, and Russia’s push into eastern Ukraine, were illegal. But Mr Trump could resolve this contradiction by arguing that accepting Russia’s hold on Crimea would only be to acknowledge reality. Using the same rationale, he may urge Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, to tolerate Russia’s sway in the east. That, in turn, could trigger a collapse of the government in Kiev, which would suit Mr Putin. Because Mr Poroshenko’s government played a role in the ousting of Paul Manafort, at one time a senior figure in Mr Trump’s campaign, it might be welcome in Washington, too.

Remember the Decembrists

Fourth on Channel One’s list was an end to “global policing” by America, and a clear recognition of the two countries’ spheres of influence. That sounds extravagant. But it may be plausible. Apart from the odd hotel deal, Mr Trump has evinced little interest in the parts of the world—eastern Europe, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union—that Mr Putin would like to suborn. Mr Trump “has no intention of carrying the torch of democracy into every corner of the world”, observed Valery Fadeev, Channel One’s anchor. Not on the list, but worth bearing in mind, is that Mr Trump’s opposition to global action on climate may look helpful to a country that depends on oil and gas exports.

The Kremlin does not expect immediate concessions. According to Nikki Haley, America’s new ambassador to the UN, sanctions relief is not imminent. Contradictory reports about what Mr Trump has said to Mr Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, one of his political opponents, suggest that he is either undecided or confused about the next steps in Ukraine. Yet the ideological value of Mr Trump’s victory for Russia is already enormous. It removes one of the biggest threats to Mr Putin’s power: the attraction of America as an alternative system of governance to the authoritarian model he has constructed.

His is not a new worry. Soviet and Russian leaders have in the past venerated America as well as demonising it. (Stalin advocated a “combination of Russian revolutionary élan with American efficiency”.) They knew its example encouraged rebels and idealists. The Decembrist revolt of 1825, in which army officers rose against Tsar Nicholas I, took inspiration from the Declaration of Independence. In 1917 some pro-revolution Russians saw America as a guiding star: Russia was to be a new America, a better and fairer one. The Soviet authorities tried, largely in vain, to root out American books, music and clothes.

They were right to be concerned: America’s successes undermined Soviet rule. After communism collapsed, America became an ideal. That started to change after Russia’s financial meltdown in 1998 and the American-led intervention in Kosovo. With Russia unable to compete economically or support its clients, its public fell back on a simple conviction: we are stronger because we are morally superior.

Coming to power at the turn of the millennium, Mr Putin co-operated with America until 2003, the year that saw Mr Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Georgia’s Rose revolution. The next year Ukraine’s Orange revolution got under way. Mr Putin believed that America had toppled the leaders of the two former Soviet republics; he had a strong aversion to seeing anything similar in Moscow. In 2011 he blamed Hillary Clinton, then America’s secretary of state, for demonstrations against him, pushing relations to a new low.

For Mr Putin, the downside of Mr Trump’s win is that it prevents him from invoking America as an enemy. This could be only a temporary setback: despite his disdain for NATO and liberal interventionism, Mr Trump may well lash out militarily somewhere, at which point anti-American propaganda can, if necessary, be cranked back up. For now, Mr Putin will be content that an American leader is at last paying him the respect he feels he deserves.

The irony is that any Russian who grew up before 1989 can see in Mr Trump the perfect Soviet caricature of a hateful American imperialist. Now, though, this same image lets the Kremlin’s propagandists present him as an ally in the global fight between right-minded nationalists and decadent Western liberals, a battle that will continue in the upcoming elections in Germany and France. Russian television particularly relishes footage of demonstrations in America and Europe. They represent a thrilling new front in a civilisational struggle led by Mr Putin—and now joined by the president of the United States.