NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Donald Trump attend the opening ceremony at the 2018 NATO Summit at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images Washington and the World Putin Has Already Won Trump’s blowup at the NATO summit is exactly what Russia hoped would happen.

Evelyn Farkas is senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. She served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia from 2012 to 2015.

President Donald Trump’s long-awaited summit with Vladimir Putin hasn’t even happened yet — and the Kremlin strongman has already pocketed a win.

One of Putin’s strategic goals is dividing the Western alliance, which he views as a mortal threat. And sure enough, at Wednesday’s kickoff of the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump launched into a tirade against Germany, accusing the country of being a pawn of Moscow due to its heavy reliance on Russian natural gas. The comments shocked European diplomats, who are accustomed to gripes from American presidents about their defense spending and troop contributions, but expect to hear such complaints in private and delivered with a lot more diplomatic finesse. The Kremlin couldn’t have scripted it better.


Even ahead of Wednesday’s fiasco, the meeting with Putin was causing great friction in the United States — including, reportedly, inside the Trump administration — and further eroding unity with the trans-Atlantic community. Trump will be sitting down with Putin in Helsinki on the heels of the disastrous NATO summit, and he seems eager — at almost any cost to alliances, U.S. democracy and national security interests — to build a positive, cooperative relationship with the longtime KGB agent, and Putin knows it.

Understanding the weakness of his target, Putin, who spent years as an intelligence operative in East Germany, will work to gain advantage for Moscow. He’s taken the measure of American presidents his mark before: Remember, during his first meeting with the deeply religious George W. Bush, Putin told a dramatic story about how a cross his mother gave him had survived a house fire. That bit of tradecraft led to the U.S. president’s statement about having looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul — a gullible remark Bush came to regret.

How will Putin try to outwit Trump? He will appeal to the president’s ego, flattering him, but also being careful to subtly show the American his place. Putin will not let Trump physically usher him into any room under the gaze of cameras, as Kim Jong Un did. He will be determined to stand his ground, at a minimum, as Trump’s equal. Putin will almost certainly try to assert dominance over the U.S. president in his usual fashion — by, for instance, keeping his counterpart waiting hours after the appointed meeting time for his arrival.

Putin will shower the vain and insecure Trump with lavish praise, acting all the while as if Russia is the full equal in power to the United States. Understanding that Trump vastly overestimates Russia’s power and influence, Putin will aim to convince the president that they can decide most important global issues between them.

Putin will seek concessions from Trump using arguments reflecting the U.S. president’s own publicly cited objectives, such as immediately bringing all U.S. troops home from foreign deployments. He will push Trump to accept Bashar Assad’s continued rule over all of Syrian territory so that U.S. forces can withdraw from Syria and perhaps elsewhere in the Middle East. He will attempt to get Trump to suspend or otherwise limit exercises on the eastern border of NATO, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. He will press for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe and perhaps Afghanistan, arguing this is necessary to reduce tensions.

Since Putin’s top immediate objective is to obtain relief from U.S. and EU sanctions, he may be willing to give a useless verbal guarantee that he will not meddle in American politics (while continuing to deny his well-documented interference in the 2016 election). He might also opt to raise with Trump his half-baked peacekeeping proposal for Ukraine, which naturally includes no measure to rapidly remove Russian military forces, their equipment and proxies from Ukrainian territory.

Putin might be willing to extend the New Start arms-control agreement, which expires in 2021, but he will not bend on the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty banning intermediate and short-range ground-launched nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers, which Russia violated over the past decade by developing and fielding a new intermediate cruise missile, putting Europe and U.S. troops stationed there at risk. His military will not countenance destroying its new missiles and he will not do so unless the United States and NATO dismantle some aspect of its missile defense infrastructure in Europe — the interceptors in Poland and Romania or the Aegis base in Spain, for example.

If Trump welcomes empty promises that Russia will stop weakening Western democracies by trying to manipulate elections and will stop using military force against its neighbors, this will further weaken U.S. defenses and European solidarity against Moscow. NATO and the EU could well fracture politically over what is an existential issue for NATO states bordering the Russian Federation and Belarus — Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria — as well as others in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Balkans that are subject to daily manipulations by Moscow.

The Kremlin won’t be satisfied until it faces a politically divided and weak collection of democratic states arrayed against Russia. Putin will work to ensure that trans-Atlantic and European institutions cannot respond to asymmetrical cyber, or special operations attacks or probes from Moscow. And he’ll also do everything he can to shape the conventional military balance to erode NATO’s advantages.

Any weakening of NATO’s military deterrence — which the West has achieved by stationing forces and equipment and conducting exercises to maintain and improve their readiness and demonstrate resolve — will carry serious consequences. The Kremlin will be emboldened by any quantitative or qualitative military retreat.

But even in the absence of agreement on anything at all, Putin’s Russia will likely achieve a more intangible prize: This creaking, economically anemic country with a GDP half the size of California’s will come off looking like America’s equal, which in reality holds true only in the nuclear arena. Putin will have puffed up Trump with praise, effectively rendering him unwilling and unable to draw a firm line against the Kremlin’s aggressive actions.

This week, Trump tweeted that his meeting with Putin may be the “easiest” of his meetings in Europe. Unlike so many of his claims, this one is true — only it’s Vladimir Vladimirovich who will likely find that his easily manipulated adversary presents very little challenge indeed.

