President Trump’s policy towards Russia, far from being the confidently friendly one that he promised on the campaign trail, has fallen victim to the beast of American domestic politics, with witch hunt hearings going on at Capitol Hill right now and feverish “deep state” slandering that America’s new leader is a ‘Russian puppet’. This ridiculous media circus has created a hostile environment which is hampering Trump’s promised approach towards Russia, so it remains doubtful whether he’ll even be ‘allowed’ to act as pragmatically towards President Putin as he initially hoped.
In fact, the Trump Administration’s rhetoric towards Russia has already been very mixed and unpredictable, with UN Ambassador Nikki Haley slamming Moscow for its reunification with Crimea and the Pentagon planning to hold a massive anti-Daesh conference conspicuously without the participation of Russia. These examples fly in the face of everything that Trump said on the campaign trail and could be interpreted as passively hostile acts against Russia. On the other hand, it can be argued that Trump “has to do this” in order to “deflect” the “deep state’s” witch hunt against him and his team, thereby buying them more time and breathing space to recover these lost policies and initiate them at a better and more domestically convenient time. Whichever possible explanation one believes, the reality is that there isn’t any consensus on what to expect during Tillerson’s upcoming trip to Moscow, and that’s a problem.
Trump inherited a host of geopolitical messes from his predecessor, including the wars in Ukraine and Syria, which would ideally require some form of pragmatic cooperation and agreement between the US and Russia in order to finally resolve. There are also two other issues which Trump is responsible for provoking, and those are the return of American tensions with Iran and North Korea, where, again, Russian diplomatic intervention could come in handy by helping all sides calm down and encouraging cooler heads to prevail. There’s no escaping the fact that Russian-American cooperation is pivotal in peacefully dealing with these Eurasian hot spots, and it’ll become clearer whether the US intends to work with Russia in these areas or not during the upcoming visit of enigmatic statesman Tillerson to Moscow.
Zoya Conover, political commentator from the US state of Georgia, and Luis Lazaro Tijerina, military science historian and theorist, stopped by to share their views with us.
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