Page 50 - bne_Magazine_June_2017

50 Opinion
bne June 2017
US President Donald Trump, left, shakes hands with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Russian Foreign Ministry Photo via AP.
The US-Russian “axis of emptiness”
Mark Galeotti of the Institute of International Relations Prague
What does it say when the biggest story to come out
of a meeting between the president of the US and
the Russian foreign minister is a spat over whether a Russian photographer should have been allowed into the Oval Office? That, at present, the relationship between Moscow and Washington is more about optics and unwarranted optimism than any real substance.
From the morning when it became clear that – certainly contrary to Moscow’s expectations – Donald Trump
had defeated Hillary Clinton (a foreign ministry insider
had confidently told me beforehand that “the American establishment won’t let that happen”), the Russians have been nervous about what this meant. For all Trump came into office talking up the prospects of an improvement in US-Russian relations, Moscow prefers predictability to this attention deficit disorder presidency, and expected that things would
go bad quickly.
They have, in part because of the president’s need to shore up his flank amidst Democrat Party attempts to paint him as the
www.bne.eu
“Siberian Candidate”, but above all for one simple, fundamen- tal reason: in this age of “Art of the Deal” geopolitics, there is terrifyingly little Moscow can offer that Trump values.
When US cruise missiles slammed into Syria’s Al Shayrat airbase in response to a chemical weapons attack, that same Russian official admitted that their every nightmare had come true: that they faced an American president who changed pol- icy at a whim, felt no need to telegraph his moves in advance, and had a much lower threshold for deploying force. In short, Trump scares the Russian foreign policy and national security establishment.
“The relationship between Moscow and Washington is more about optics and unwarranted optimism than any real substance”