Russia’s Trump dossier

I take it as true that Russia interfered in the US election in favor of Donald Trump, even if I don’t go so far as to say that is the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election. Those who don’t agree needn’t read further. I wish you well in your parallel universe.

The overt response President Obama announced yesterday was classic diplomacy: expel diplomats, close official facilities, add key institutions and decision-makers to the list of specially designated individuals subject to sanctions. We don’t know what else might be going on. I won’t be surprised to see publication of news about high-ranking Russians stashing ill-gotten gains abroad. Or, as one of my ambassadors used to put it, pictures of Putin with a goat.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov announced the classic response: a symmetrical expulsion of diplomats and closure of facilities. But President Putin one-upped him quickly, saying Moscow would not respond in kind. He is leaving the door open to a decision by President Trump on January 20 to rescind Obama’s moves. The choreography is impressive. It conveys clearly that Putin is in charge and suggests that he is magnanimous, not vindictive.

This maneuver puts President-elect Trump in a bind. If he backs off Obama’s moves, he will displease prominent Republican senators whose votes are needed to confirm his Russophilic nominee for Secretary of State, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson. He will also dig an even deeper hole than he is already in with the intelligence community, whose briefings he is skipping and whose assessments he has rejected. If he maintains the expulsions and other measures, he risks ending before it even began his promised reset and partnership with Russia.

I’m thinking he’ll choose the former: he’ll back off at least the expulsions, if not the rest. Why? Because his commitment to befriending Putin’s Russia is the one constant in Trump’s many random statements on foreign policy. America has elected a new president profoundly and consistently committed to partnering with Russia, against the collective wisdom of what he insists on continuing to call “the swamp,” the Washington establishment. Rather than draining it, Trump is installing his own alligators, who will be far friendlier to Russia and far more hostile to China and Iran.

I won’t be surprised if Trump also gives Putin other things he really wants: official acceptance of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and a deal on Luhansk and Donestk (in Ukraine’s Donbas) that allows them to be virtually independent of Kiev. This in turn will trigger further Russian irredentist moves in Moldova, Georgia, and the Baltics as well as heightened efforts at partition in the Balkans (Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia). If Ukraine can be de facto partitioned, why not all these other places? If you are an ethnic nationalist and not a liberal democrat, keeping people together from different ethnicities makes no sense.

Barack Obama needs to do his best to block this drift of American foreign policy away from its traditional support for liberal democracy and towards an alliance with ethnic nationalists. I’m hoping he’ll use the covert retaliation against Russia for its interference in the American election to make public whatever we know not only about the Russian elite’s finances but also about its relationship to Trump. As better Russia experts than me have said, Putin unquestionably has a dossier on the President-elect, possibly one that explains his consistent Russophilia. Getting that out in the open would go a long way to clarifying why Trump leans over backwards to accommodate Moscow and to blocking him from continuing to do it.