Max Boot

“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s minds, this was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

That was Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency, speaking this week about the pre-election hack of Democratic Party and Clinton campaign personnel emails. Translated from bureaucratese, what he meant was that the hack was undertaken by Vladimir Putin to influence the U.S. election. U.S. intelligence chiefs will not go so far as to say that Putin’s intent was to elect Donald Trump — it’s also possible that the Russian leader just wanted to sow dissension — but it’s pretty significant that the Kremlin made no attempt to steal and release emails from the Republican campaign.

And why would they? Trump repeatedly praised Putin as a “strong leader,” and refused to criticize him for anything. He even refused to accept the U.S. intelligence community judgment that Putin was behind the DNC leaks. He did, however, suggest that NATO might be “obsolete,” that he might not defend the Baltic republics from Russian aggression, and that he might lift sanctions on Russia — in other words, he might enact Putin’s dream list of American policies.

After Trump won, Russians close to Putin were openly cheering. “Today I want to ride around Moscow with an American flag in the window, if I can find a flag,” tweeted Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the Kremlin’s propaganda organ, RT. And Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov admitted that the Kremlin had maintained contacts with Trump during the campaign: “Obviously we know most of the people from his entourage.”

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That entourage at one time included former campaign chief Paul Manafort, who is linked to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, and policy adviser Carter Page, who is linked to Russia oil giant Gazprom. Now Manafort and Page are gone. But retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a campaign adviser whom Trump reportedly asked Thursday to be his national security adviser, has acknowledged he accepted a payment to attend an RT banquet last year in Moscow. He sat next to Putin himself.

The love-fest between Putin and Trump continued after the election, with Trump praising Putin for sending him a “beautiful” letter of congratulations. On Nov. 14, the two leaders spoke on the telephone and agreed, according to a Kremlin statement, “to normalize relations and pursue constructive cooperation on the broadest possible range of issues.” It is perhaps no coincidence that within hours Russian warplanes resumed their bombardment of Aleppo, hitting hospitals and other civilian targets to terrorize the population into acquiescing to rule by Putin’s ally, Bashar Assad.

Trump repeatedly said, both before and after the election, that he would end U.S. support for Syrian rebels and align the U.S. with Russia in Syria. “My attitude,” he told The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 11, “was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS.” Actually, as the Aleppo strikes show, Russia is more intent on getting rid of mainstream Syrian rebels rather than the Islamic State, because it views the more moderate rebels as the greater threat to Assad. But such nuances are likely to escape a president-elect who erroneously claimed during one debate that Aleppo had already fallen.

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The only real questions at this point are how far Trump will go in a pro-Russia direction and how long this rapprochement will last. He is hardly the first American president to come into office vowing to improve relations with Putin. George W. Bush claimed to have looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul. Barack Obama pursued a “reset” of relations. Both initiatives floundered when Putin launched unprovoked aggression such as his 2008 invasion of Georgia and his 2014 invasion of Ukraine. It’s quite possible, even likely, that the good feelings between Putin and Trump will similarly give way to mutual recriminations and suspicions after Putin does something that Trump views as a personal insult.

There will certainly be prominent Republican voices inside and outside the administration arguing for a tougher policy on Russia. Vice President Mike Pence is a hardliner and so are most of the people — John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani and now Mitt Romney — who are being mentioned for senior national security posts. Just this week, Sen. John McCain warned Trump not to place any faith in statements made by a “former KGB agent who has plunged his country into tyranny.”

Trump is too mercurial a figure to pursue any policy with any consistency, even a pro-Russia policy. We can only hope that Russia does not succeed in reestablishing its empire and swallowing some of America’s more vulnerable allies in Eastern Europe before Trump wakes up to the fact that Putin is not America’s friend.

Max Boot is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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