by Luke Harding
The undulating concert hall on the north bank of the Elbe was hosting the G20 participants and delegates. The program included a gala performance and dinner. Putin and Trump were guests. So were Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who had traveled to Germany as part of the official U.S. delegation.
Oltermann witnessed the surreal occasion. “It was like something out of a dystopian science fiction film. You had the most powerful people in the world eating canapés in an ivory tower and listening to Beethoven. And then outside you had thousands of anarchists, covered in blood, battling with police.”
He watched as Greenpeace activists tried to reach the hall on speedboats. They were stopped. About twenty activists then plunged into the water and started swimming frantically toward the venue; the police fished them out. One protester managed to smash the window of a U.S. delegate’s car. Oltermann likened what he saw to a hellish and watery vision by the medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch. “It looked like the End of Days,” he observed.
Unseen by those outside, something strange was going on inside.
During the concert the Trumps sat next to the Macrons. At dinner spouses were separated. Melania was placed next to Putin; Trump alongside Juliana Awada, the wife of Argentina’s president. At some point Trump got up. He sat down again—next to Putin. For the next hour Trump and Putin were deep in conversation. Only one other person was with them, Putin’s personal interpreter.
What they discussed was a mystery. Trump left his own interpreter behind, in a breach of national security protocol. G20 leaders looked on in amazement. Circulating at these high-level events was normal. But the U.S. president, who had skipped most of the plenary sessions, only appeared to want to talk to one person.
The White House kept quiet about the meeting. It was revealed only after two people who were there tipped off Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group.
Bremmer said his informants were “startled” by what they witnessed. “It’s very clear that Trump’s best single relationship in the G20 is with Putin. U.S. allies were surprised, flummoxed, disheartened,” he said. “You’ve got Trump in the room with all these allies and who’s the one he spends time with?”
Trump dismissed claims he tried to conceal the chat as “ridiculous.” He told The New York Times that the meal was “going toward dessert” when he decided to say hello to Melania and sat with Putin: “It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be fifteen minutes. Just talked about things.”
The things, Trump clarified, included “adoptions”—that is, sanctions. And, uncannily enough, the same subject discussed during the closed meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., Veselnitskaya, and a former Russian spy. Putin wanted them gone. They were still in place.
If Trump failed to remove them, how might Putin respond?
These questions were unanswerable, not least because there was no government record of this private conversation. Trump’s critics sniffed conspiracy. The columnist David Frum tweeted that the president had things to say to Putin that “he wants literally nobody in the US govt to hear, very much including his own National Security team.” Garry Kasparov said Trump was reporting to his “KGB handler.”
Such assertions were unverifiable. But six months into his presidency Trump’s weirdly deferential behavior toward Putin—his singular reluctance to criticize, his boundless willingness to appease, his desire for face time—were there for all to see.
It looked like a kind of thraldom.
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One of the KGB’s long-standing goals was—as one secret memo put it—to “aggravate disagreements” between the United States and Western Europe. As Kryuchkov’s instructions showed, Moscow wanted to “deepen division” within NATO and to cleave the United States from its allies.
Until the election of Trump, this strategy had never quite worked. The EU and the Obama administration had coordinated their responses to Russia’s assault on Ukraine, for example. There were differences, for sure. But the postwar transatlantic relationship was solid.
It was based on values, even if the practice of them was often flawed. They included international institutions, NATO and its mutual defense pact, the global rule of law, human rights, and basic decency.
Now the Atlantic alliance was in trouble. For the first time in more than seventy years European states were beginning to ask a question that in previous times might have seemed ridiculous.
It was this: Is the U.S. administration as led by Donald Trump actually an ally?
These doubts had several dimensions. First, Trump seemed to prefer the company of autocrats—Putin, the Saudis—to that of his own democratically elected peers. Second, there was Trump’s ill-informed commentary on Twitter. Often he criticized the Europeans, and in particular the Germans.
This did not mean the Atlantic alliance was finished. Mike Hayden, the former CIA director, observed that the partnership had such strong historical roots that it would survive, despite suffering heavy “blows” from Trump.
But there was a rift. Its scale was apparent before the Hamburg summit, when Trump made his maiden trip as president to Europe. As an exercise in diplomatic outreach, the trip in May was a disaster. In Brussels, the president unveiled a memorial to 9/11, the one occasion when NATO’s collective defense principle, article 5, was invoked. His speech, however, made no mention of the United States’ commitment to it.
Instead, Trump used his speech to reprove other countries for “not paying what they should be paying” into the NATO budget. He said they owed “massive amounts.” (Not true: NATO’s spending rules were domestic guidelines.)
In the case of Duško Marković, the prime minister of Montenegro, this low-grade hectoring went a step further. On the way to a NATO summit photo shoot Trump pushed Marković aside. Probably Trump had no idea who Marković was. Yet if Putin had been able to choose which man in a suit to shove, he would surely have chosen Marković.
To the intense displeasure of Moscow, Montenegro was joining NATO. Russia views the western Balkans as its zone of influence. According to Montenegrin officials, Russian intelligence had recently tried to stage a coup in the capital, Podgorica, with a view to halting its NATO accession. The plot—allegedly involving a GRU officer—failed.
There was more physical theater during Trump’s first meeting with Macron, which featured an extended—and arguably victorless—handshake war. Then there was a meeting with the EU’s executive leadership, in which Trump complained about Germany’s trade surplus with the United States.
“The Germans are bad, very bad,” Trump said, according to one participant who spoke to Der Spiegel. Trump added: “See the millions of cars they are selling to the United States. Terrible. We will stop this.”
Trump’s behavior at the G7 summit, hosted by Italy the same week, was scarcely an improvement, from the European perspective. The venue was the town of Taormina in Sicily. There was disagreement over climate change, with six countries opposing one country, Trump’s.
Then there was the president’s aloof style. The leaders strolled seven hundred yards together to the town’s hilltop piazza. Minus Trump, who took a golf cart.
No wonder, then, that in a speech launching her bid to be reelected chancellor for the fourth time, Merkel noted that the EU was now on its own. It could no longer rely on the United States or post-Brexit Britain. Merkel implied that she’d come to this conclusion following her recent brushes with Trump. “I’ve experienced that in the last few days. We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands,” she said, speaking in Munich.
Trump was unpopular in Germany. For Merkel to distance herself from his administration made electoral sense.
At the same time, Merkel’s negative view of Trump might be explained by other factors. In 2016 the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, supplied material to the Obama administration concerning contacts between the Trump team and Russians. The BND reported directly to Merkel’s office. It had inside knowledge of Trump’s busines
s transactions, many of them conducted via German banks.
One former senior director on the U.S. National Security Council speculated: “Merkel knows how bad Trump is. She’s been briefed [by her agencies].”
The ex-director said that as someone who grew up in communist East Germany, Merkel—the daughter of a pastor, a onetime research scientist, and a fluent Russian speaker who visited Soviet Moscow—had little tolerance for lying. “She lived through that. She’s almost Calvinist,” the former official said.
Beyond the atmospherics, and Trump’s boorish habits, there were substantial foreign policy differences—most of all over Russia.
Evidently, Trump chose to believe Putin’s assurances of Russian noninvolvement in hacking. The Europeans knew better. The Kremlin’s interference in the U.S. election was merely the latest manifestation of a deliberate attempt to distort democracy, often involving cyber attacks. It had been going on across Europe for some time.
In 2007 Moscow staged its first major external Web attack, against Estonia. Since then, suspected Russian hacking teams had targeted EU institutions and, in 2015, the German parliament. Like the DNC hack, the apparent goal was to gather data with a view to influencing Germany’s elections. And to damage Merkel, Europe’s most powerful leader and a proponent of Crimea-related sanctions.
The Russian hackers struck France, too. In April 2015 they breached the television network TV5Monde. The hackers suspended programming for three hours. According to the French government’s cyber agency, they were from the same group that would later be designated as Fancy Bear. The attack was a warm-up. On the eve of the 2017 French general election, hackers dumped tens of thousands of emails and other documents from the systems of Macron’s political party, En Marche!
The breach came too late to affect the result. But the method—an anonymous cyber raid, the material linked by WikiLeaks—was redolent of the DNC hack.
As EU spy chiefs warned, cyber attacks were part of a hybrid Russian strategy. Another plank was to support far-left and far-right parties across the European continent. This could be political and financial. In Soviet times, Moscow helped and sponsored Western communist parties and friendship societies. Now it was cultivating a soft-power network of radical nationalist groups opposed to the European Union and friendly to Putin.
One beneficiary was Marine Le Pen, whose far-right National Front received a €9.4 million loan from a Russian bank. Le Pen backed Trump’s White House bid and received an implicit endorsement in return, when Trump described her ahead of the French presidential election as the “strongest” candidate on borders and terrorism. In January Le Pen visited Trump Tower (without, apparently, meeting Trump). In March she held talks at the Kremlin with Putin.
The Europeans viewed Putin with skepticism and foreboding.
Trump, seemingly, saw Moscow as his nearest G20 ally. But if Putin did something that directly damaged and offended U.S. interests, Trump would rebuke him. Wouldn’t he?
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The Harry S. Truman Building in Foggy Bottom is a piece of monumental architecture. Its white classical lines radiate calm and austere grandeur. In the years after World War II, the U.S. State Department was the planet’s most consequential foreign ministry. Its soft power was enormous.
The State Department’s officers were a dedicated bunch. In 2010 diplomatic cables sent by U.S. missions around the world were leaked. This was embarrassing for Hillary Clinton. Paradoxically, these on-the-ground reports enhanced her department’s reputation. They offered frank, and sometimes unflattering, assessments of world leaders; analysis, much of it of high quality; and some entertaining gossip. A few were written with literary flair.
Seven years later, and the State Department was—in the words of one D.C. insider—“being gutted.” Senior posts requiring Senate confirmation remained unfilled, the Trump administration was proposing a 32 percent cut in the budget, and around a third of ambassadorial jobs were vacant. Scandinavia was a black hole: no head of mission in Oslo, Stockholm, or Helsinki. Or Berlin or Brussels or Canberra.
Veteran diplomats were heading for the door, off and out after long careers. Principal assistant deputy secretaries were being thinned out.
One explanation for this was new management. Tillerson was an aloof and inscrutable figure who made little or no effort to communicate with his seventy-five thousand employees. During the early months of the Trump administration, Tillerson was practically invisible. According to the rumors, Tillerson was deeply at odds with his boss and being constantly undercut by the White House, a few blocks away.
There was proof of this following the wretched events that summer in Charlottesville, Virginia. One person was killed and others injured when a suspected white nationalist drove into a group of activists protesting a neo-Nazi rally. Trump’s response was to condemn violence on “many sides.” There were many “fine people” among those who had attended the far-right rally, the president said. His sympathies, evidently, were with the white supremacists, some of whom had marched in Charlottesville waving torches and chanting: “Jews will not replace us.”
In a Fox interview, Tillerson was asked if Trump’s comments made it harder for him to represent America abroad. Were U.S. values Trump’s values? Tillerson’s damning answer: “The president speaks for himself.”
There was a fundamental problem, too: what, in the age of Trump, was the State Department’s mission?
Was it to uphold American principles abroad? Or simply to deal with bad people (terrorists, Islamist radicals) and China? And to cultivate warm relations with authoritarian kingdoms where Trump had hotels and branded golf resorts? Was Trump an America First isolationist or an interventionist?
As a candidate Trump had disdained internationalism, condoned the use of torture, and declared climate change “a hoax.” His worldview, if you could call it that, was unashamedly inward-looking.
This nativist creed appeared to be for real—at least until August. In a major speech Trump announced that he was increasing the number of American troops in Afghanistan. The president said he was no longer interested in nation-building. Even so, Trump’s new strategy looked remarkably like Obama’s. It marked defeat for Breitbart and a victory for Trump’s generals, plus U.S. intelligence agencies, all of them believers in the use of American force abroad.
Friends of State watched the president’s flip-flop with confusion and dismay. Writing in the Times, Roger Cohen called Trump’s determination to chop the State Department a “strange act of national self-amputation.” Cohen offered reasons for its dismemberment. They included the president’s love of military leaders, Steve Bannon’s plan to “deconstruct” the administrative state, and revenge on a bureaucracy that was once Hillary’s. It appeared that State’s woes couldn’t get worse.
But they did.
According to the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff, the Trump administration in its early weeks had tried to “normalize” relations with Russia. Officials asked State Department staffers to come up with a plan that would see the diplomatic compounds closed by Obama given back to Moscow. And a unilateral package scrapping the sanctions introduced over the hacking. The goal was a “grand bargain” with the Kremlin. It was unclear what, if anything, Russia would have to offer in return.
The plan ran into immediate opposition on Capitol Hill and was abandoned after Michael Flynn’s resignation. In fact, Congress was moving in the other direction. Two weeks after the G20 summit it passed a comprehensive new sanctions package, designed to censure Russia for its interference in the United States and Ukraine. The bill passed the House of Representatives by 419 votes to 3, and the Senate by 98 votes to 2. This left Trump little option but to sign it into law.
This he did, grudgingly. At the same time he signaled to Moscow that he believed the legislation to be “seriously flawed” and a curtailment of his executive right as president to decide foreign policy. In short, he didn’t like it.
The Kremlin’s reaction was icy. The fore
ign ministry said it was closing down the U.S. embassy dacha, spared in December, and rescinding access to warehouse space. And cutting the number of diplomats and support staff at U.S. missions in Russia. Not by 35, as Obama did, but by 775. This, the ministry said, would bring the number of American personnel in Russia in line with the number of Russians in the United States.
Russian officials sought to absolve Trump of blame for this “countermove.” They portrayed the U.S. president as a victim—of a ploy by “the deep state” and abetted by the fake news media to prevent the normalization of ties. As Dmitry Medvedev put it on Twitter:
The U.S. establishment fully outwitted Trump. The president is not happy about the sanctions, yet he could not but sign the bill.
However the Russia media might spin it, the expulsions were a hostile and provocative move. They damaged the United States’ ability to conduct diplomacy. And, on a basic level, to provide visas to ordinary Russians seeking to travel to the United States. Trump’s reaction, then, should have been obvious: to protest, lament, and condemn.
Instead, when asked about the expulsions, Trump said:
I want to thank him [Putin], because we’re trying to cut down our payroll and as far as I’m concerned, I’m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll. There’s no real reason for them to go back. I greatly appreciate the fact that we’ve been able to cut our payroll of the United States. We’re going to save a lot of money.
Even by Trump’s standards, the remarks were a surprise. He was thanking Putin. Expressing gratitude to Russia’s president for upending the careers of loyal American diplomats and wrecking those of officers preparing for a Moscow posting.