The Risks Lying Within Donald Trump’s One-on-One Meeting With Vladimir Putin

GOP senator, who recently met with Russia’s leader, warns of ‘denial, hostility, blaming others’

“If our experience is any indication of what the president will find, it will be denial, hostility, blaming others and long and tedious responses,” the Kansas Republican said in an interview as he was returning home.
.. Moreover, Sen. Moran suggests the president might want to think twice about his plan to meet privately with Mr. Putin, with no aides present. The senator and his colleagues are fuming at the way the Russian media portrayed (or, they say, baldly mis-portrayed) their own private meetings with Russian officials, suggesting the Americans only briefly and meekly raised the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 election campaign.
..  Trump, understandably, has focused instead on what he sees as the upside potential. In general, he thinks the world is a safer place if the U.S. and Russia get along. More specifically, he wants Russia to help in the effort to force North Korea to denuclearize by not providing backdoor economic relief to the regime in Pyongyang, particularly by buying North Korean coal.

.. Russia may use the very fact of a private meeting with the president to claim the U.S. has accepted Russia’s annexation of Crimea and acknowledged its right to interfere in Ukraine. Russian media already have trumpeted statements by Mr. Trump suggesting sympathy for the Russian position on Crimea as proof the Americans have thrown in the towel on the subject.
Moreover, Mr. Putin may well use Mr. Trump’s own apparent ambivalence about the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to portray the U.S. and Russia as moving beyond the traditional alliance that has guarded Western security through the post-World War II era.
.. Mr. Trump and his aides are playing a good-cop, bad-cop routine, in which Mr. Trump questions the motives of America’s allies and carries on pointed spats with the leaders of France, Germay and Canada, while his aides praise the allies and their efforts. In a briefing for reporters last week, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to NATO, lauded what she called “the biggest increase in defense spending by our allies since the Cold War.”
.. Finally, Mr. Putin doubtless will continue to simply deny any interference in the 2016 election campaign, a denial that Mr. Trump noted again on Twitter last week: “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!”The risk is that the Russian leader will use Mr. Trump’s seeming willingness to accept his denials as proof that any claims to the contrary—including a seven-page bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee last week—are specious.

Mr. Trump’s critics already portray him as way too cozy with his Russian counterpart. Unless Mr. Trump plays the summit well, he could allow the meeting to play directly into that critique.

Trump’s Retreat From the West

Mr. Trump seems to have followed a blueprint for a resolution to the Korean conflict that China and Russia proposed a year before.

“The idea is to ensure a double freeze,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said in an interview with NBC in Moscow on July 21, 2017. “North Korea suspends all their launches and tests, and in response, the U.S. and South Korea reduce the scale of their war maneuvers in the region.”

But all the meeting really accomplished was to open the prospect of new and probably lengthy negotiations for a final peace on the peninsula. Achieving that will depend on how the interests of five countries — North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia and the United States — can all be served.

North Korea and South Korea were created when World War II ended with Soviet troops occupying the northern part of the Korean Peninsula and American troops the south. After North Korea invaded the South in 1950, only to be driven back to China’s border by American-led forces, the fighting didn’t stop until after Chinese troops poured in and restored Communist control in the North.

.. A person of Mr. Putin’s age and experience cannot help seeing in Korea a likeness to a divided Germany. Having served in East Germany as a K.G.B. officer, Mr. Putin was deeply dismayed at the Soviet Union’s decision nearly three decades ago to give up control of what had been the Communists’ East Bloc. Today, his most powerful narrative of grievance is of the West expanding its institutions — especially NATO — to Russia’s western border. He would surely be loath to see the West achieve a matching situation at its eastern door.

..  Mr. Putin, speaking to Chinese reporters in Qingdao, called Mr. Trump’s decision to meet Mr. Kim “very brave and mature.”
.. It is likely that without Mr. Xi’s nod, Mr. Kim would not have met with Mr. Trump. And China may have kept its distance and let the American president steal the spotlight, hoping that a peaceful North Korea colonized by Chinese, Russian and American businesses might emerge and make an American military presence on the peninsula irrelevant
.. Mr. Trump’s foreign policy vision ignores concerns about other countries’ political structures as long as a deal can be reached. He clearly prefers bilateral deals to multilateral accords. He enjoys politics that are personal rather than institutional.

How, Exactly, Does This Travel Ban Keep Us Safe, Mr. President?

The ostensible purpose of your ban is to keep Americans safe from terrorists by barring visitors, refugees and immigrants from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. So let’s consider, nonhysterically, what such a ban might have accomplished had it come into force in recent years.

It would not have barred Ramzi Yousef, the Kuwait-born Pakistani who helped mastermind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

It would have been irrelevant in the case of Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, the American perpetrators of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 people were murdered.

It would have been irrelevant in the case of Eric Rudolph, the Christian terrorist who killed one person at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and later bombed abortion clinics and a gay bar.

It would not have barred Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers. Atta was an Egyptian citizen who arrived in the U.S. on a visa issued by the American Embassy in Berlin in May 2000.

It would not have barred Atta’s accomplices, all in the United States on legal visas. Fifteen of them were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and another from Lebanon.

It would have been irrelevant in the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks, in which five people were killed. The attacks are widely believed (without conclusive proof) to have been the work of the late Bruce Ivins, an American microbiologist.

It would not have barred Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a Miami-bound airliner in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes. Reid was a London-born Briton who converted to Islam as an adult.