After Syria, a good time for Donald Trump to cancel Vladimir Putin's White House invitation Donald Trump rewarded Vladimir Putin's aggression with a White House invitation. With the chemical weapons attack in Syria, it's a good time to cancel.

Michael Carpenter | Opinion contributor

As the United States mounts a response to Syrian President Bashar Assad's barbaric use of chemical weapons against his own citizens, and with President Trump's recognition of Russia's complicity in the chemical attack, now is a good time to formally cancel Russian President Vladimir Putin's invitation to a White House summit.

In a call to Putin last month, Trump ignored his own hand-picked national security adviser's emphatic advice, delivered as the ALL-CAPS injunction “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” Putin on a sham election, and did exactly the opposite. His fawning praise was all the more distasteful when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders blithely claimed that “we don’t get to dictate how other countries operate.”

Evidently Trump and Sanders needed reminding that Putin’s two leading opponents were both eliminated prior to the election: former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov was murdered in front of the Kremlin in 2015 and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was barred from running in 2017. Indeed, we do not dictate such outcomes.

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Later, we learned from Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov that during the call, Trump also invited Putin to Washington for a White House summit. The obvious question is why Trump reward Putin with a White House photo op a mere couple of weeks after the Kremlin used a chemical nerve agent on a former Russian spy and his daughter on the territory of a key U.S. ally.

The invitation has concrete implications. First, it threatens to break a tenuous transatlantic consensus on Russia’s diplomatic isolation. Second, it allows Putin to claim domestically that his aggressive tactics have compelled the respect of the president of the United States. Third, it will be seen by our allies and partners as weakness in the face of Russian aggression.

The decision to invite Putin, whether planned in advance or suggested on the fly, is a huge mistake, and unlikely to have been endorsed by the president’s national security team. The president did, however, explain his reason for inviting Putin, tweeting on March 21 that Russia “can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race.”

The problem with this argument, of course, is that Russia is actually the root of the problem in almost all of these cases.

On North Korea, the Kremlin’s key goal appears to be weakening U.S. extended deterrence, and thus our alliances, in East Asia. To achieve this, Moscow appears to have decided it can live with a nuclear North Korea, which currently poses little direct threat to Russia and can be deterred with Russia’s nuclear arsenal. That is likely why the Kremlin feels no compunction to isolate Pyongyang and even dispatched a cabinet-level official to North Korea on March 20-21 to convene a business-as-usual meeting of the North Korea-Russia Intergovernmental Committee for Cooperation on trade, economy, science and technology.

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On Syria and Iran, the de-escalation regime that Trump negotiated with great fanfare during a tete-a-tete with Putin in Germany in July 2017 has proven disastrous. The Damascus suburb of East Ghouta has been turned into a slaughterhouse as Assad’s forces, with Russian support, have annihilated the civilian population with conventional as well as chemical weapons. Meanwhile, rather than quelling Iran’s influence in the region, the Russian-policed “de-escalation” zones have allowed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps to create a de facto corridor from southern Iraq to Lebanon, directly threatening U.S. interests.

In Ukraine, Russia continues to kill Ukrainian soldiers and civilians almost every week, pushing the death toll over 10,000, and making a complete mockery of the Minsk ceasefire agreements of September 2014 and February 2015. Trump's own envoy for Ukraine, Ambassador Kurt Volker, acknowledges there are few signs of Russia's willingness to engage on a resolution that would fully restore Ukraine's sovereignty. Since Moscow's ultimate goal is to usher in a more pliant government in Kyiv, it is unrealistic to expect Putin to relent absent significantly increased pressure from the West.

Finally, Trump is purported to have told Putin that if Russia pursues an arms race, the United States will "win.” Trump later bragged that in the phone call he had made important progress on arms control. But what progress is there when Russia is openly violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, is no longer complying with the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, selectively violates the Open Skies Treaty, and has clearly breached the Chemical Weapons Convention with its recent use of the Novichok nerve agent?

Trump is fooling himself if he thinks he can earn Russian cooperation on issues where the Kremlin’s key goal is to undermine Western interests. Either that or he is cynically selling empty promises to the American people to preserve a friendly relationship with Putin. Like the ill-fated joint “cyber unit” that he agreed to with Putin on the margins of the G20 summit, Trump’s braggadocio about delivering win-win deals has so far ended up only with complete failures. And such failure comes with a price: Trump’s unbridled desire to have a friendly relationship with Putin emboldens Moscow to act aggressively in the knowledge that there are unlikely to be any serious consequences.

Michael Carpenter,an Atlantic Council Fellow, is former deputy assistant secretary of Defense and former national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. Follow him on Twitter: @mikercarpenter.