Trump will consider allowing Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia under Obama, to be the pawn in a lopsided geostrategic drama. Photograph by Dmitry Kostyukov / NYT / Redux

As if it were not already clear that the Helsinki summit was one of the most ill-conceived and disastrous diplomatic events in recent American history, we now get the news that President Trump has not dismissed the idea that Russian investigators meet with, and question, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.

President Trump has said that Vladimir Putin tendered him an “incredible offer”: that, in exchange for letting Robert Mueller’s team question the twelve indicted Russian intelligence officers thought to have participated in the cyber-meddling in the 2016 election, Russian counterparts would get the chance to question McFaul, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia during the Obama years. Rather than dismiss this idea out of hand, Trump, according to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is “going to work with his team, and we’ll let you know if there’s an announcement on this front.”

This is astonishing. And officials from the former Secretary of State John Kerry to the former Ambassador to China Max Baucus have said so. But today astonishment is the permanent condition of American public life.

I’ve known Michael McFaul for more than twenty-five years. When I was a Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, in the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era, I met him when he was a young scholar in Moscow and an ardent supporter of the pro-democracy movement. I encountered him again as he moved into public service. His years as Ambassador under Obama were extraordinarily difficult. He came to Moscow intending to be a major player in Obama’s attempt to “reset” relations with Russia. The story, almost from the first, was depressing. Putin was becoming increasingly authoritarian and suspicious; he saw McFaul as an instrument of Western plots to undermine and even overthrow him. I profiled McFaul at length, in 2014; it’s a piece that tries to tell the Putin story through an American emissary who, though hardly naïve, had hoped to improve relations with Russia but arrived at the worst possible time.

McFaul, who returned to Stanford as a professor and wrote a memoir, “From Cold War to Hot Peace,” had a troubled tenure as Ambassador, but mainly he was a victim of circumstances—circumstances dominated by Putin. That an American President would consider, even for a moment, making him a pawn in a lopsided geostrategic drama is, well, astonishing.