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Opinion
May 19, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 22
STOLYPIN: The US-Russian “axis of emptiness”
Mark Galeotti of the Institute of International Relations
The biggest story to come out of Sergei Lavrov's meeting with Donald Trump was a spat over whether a Russian photographer should have been allowed into the Oval Office.
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 for- eign ministry insider had confidently told me be- forehand 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 predict- ability 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 at- tempts to paint him as the “Siberian Candidate”, but above all for one simple, fundamental reason: in this age of “Art of the Deal” geopolitics, there is terrifying little Moscow can offer that Trump values.
When US cruise missiles slammed into Syria’s Al Shayrat airbase in response to a chemical weap- ons attack, that same Russian official admitted that their every nightmare had come true: that they
Sergei Lavrov
faced an American president who changed policy 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.
Hence, in part, the strange ambiguity about Rus- sian policy. President Vladimir Putin, for example, is notoriously prone to keeping guests waiting
for meetings, not least as a power play. When US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Mos-
cow the week after the cruise missile strike, the invitation to meet with Putin only came at the eleventh hour – but when it did come, Tillerson was subjected to no repetition of the three-hour wait that had faced his predecessor, John Kerry.
On the one hand, Moscow is, as usual, trying to identify the new administration’s red lines, its core interests, its knee-jerk responses, and its limits. Typi- cally, it does this by a mix of calibrated provocations – buzzing a warship here, some over-the-top rhetoric there – and an equally-calibrated charm offensive.
With dawning horror, though, the Russians have realised that all the old geopolitical tradecraft is only of limited utility in the era of Trump. Today’s red lines are not necessarily tomorrow’s: if one were being cynical, one would suggest that it all depends on the headlines on Fox News. The US’ interests are intensely personal, about Trump’s ego and his and his friends’ and families’ busi- nesses. Its limits are, worryingly, unclear.
At the same time, though, Moscow and Wash- ington cannot ignore each other. The irony is that both would probably love to make deals with the