Trump and Putin, Through a Glass Darkly

As 2017 dawns, relations between the United States and Russia are at their worst level since the height of the Cold War. Russia has been under U.S. sanctions since it seized Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and new sanctions were added after U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia was responsible for hacking and publicizing emails from the Democratic National Committee and other political actors during the 2016 elections. In recent years, the number of dangerous military incidents between the two countries has skyrocketed, as the Russian military seems determined to test U.S. readiness by provoking hazardous close encounters in the air and at sea. Russia has built up military forces and weaponry along its borders with NATO countries, causing NATO at its 2016 Warsaw Summit to approve small force presence increases in some of its own member states that border Russia, including the post-Soviet Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well as Poland. Moscow regularly stages unannounced war exercises modeled after World War II land battles. Meanwhile, a wide range of arms control treaties between Washington and Moscow, which helped define U.S.-Soviet relations and limit the danger of their interactions in the late Cold War era, lie in tatters. As outgoing President Barack Obama leaves office, communications between U.S. officials and their Russian counterparts have reportedly virtually ceased.

But Donald Trump’s election has thrown a wrench into predictions about U.S.-Russia relations. Trump has expressed admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin and seems to be heading for another attempt at a “reset.” However, Trump’s statements and cabinet nominations have engendered so much controversy, including within the Republican Party, that it remains to be seen what direction U.S. policy toward Russia will take during his administration. It is also unclear what President Putin may have in mind for President Trump.

This essay will first examine the controversies over Russian hacking and their potential consequences, and then consider U.S. sanctions and their likely trajectory. Next, it will examine Russia-NATO tensions in more depth, including Russian use of information warfare against Washington’s European allies. It will then turn to a discussion of Putin’s seeming aims. The essay will close with an overall assessment of the relationship going forward, focusing on challenges that will need to be overcome for Trump to succeed in his attempts at a new reset in the relationship.

Russian Interference in the U.S. Election

U.S. policy toward Russia under Trump will take shape against the backdrop of ongoing debates about Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. Despite some initial uncertainty about whether the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies converged, more recent reports indicate that the CIA and FBI agree that Putin himself most likely oversaw the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and that the ultimate Russian goal was to support Trump’s candidacy over that of Democrat Hillary Clinton. There is additional evidence that Russian sources routinely published “fake news” on English-language websites in an attempt to swing public opinion against Clinton. Trump initially ridiculed these reports, stating that no one really knows who did the hacking and that he does not trust the CIA because of the bad intelligence it provided in the lead-up to the Iraq War of 2003.

Several high-ranking Republican politicians have disagreed with Trump’s dismissive comments and demanded an immediate rigorous bipartisan investigation into Russian hacking. The internal conflict among powerful Republican leaders is a crucial bellwether because pitched disagreement between Congress and the White House over U.S. policy toward Russia could wreak havoc on a wide variety of presidential initiatives. A fundamental question to watch, then, as the Trump presidency unfolds is whether Trump takes seriously the U.S. intelligence community’s findings that Russia tried to sabotage the U.S. electoral process. If Trump accepts this conclusion, it will be hard for him to reset relations with Russia. If he rejects it and continues to criticize U.S. intelligence agencies publicly, he may also find himself in a lasting...