Tom Nichols

Opinion contributor

The Group of 20 summit is over, and some conservatives — after giving President Trump a mulligan for his clumsy outing at NATO in May — are declaring his first major international conference a success.

In fact, the president’s trip to Hamburg and his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin were, to use one of the president’s favorite words, a disaster. Not only did he fail to restore the West’s shaken confidence in American leadership, he also made a series of rookie blunders in his meeting with Putin that will now bedevil U.S. national security for years to come.

Before his arrival at the G-20, Trump read a speech in Poland that many conservatives gamely tried to compare to the Cold War rhetoric of earlier presidents, in a flash of hope that Trump would later put the smirking Russian president in his place. Despite a few nice turns, however, it nonetheless carried the usual anti-Muslim barnacles that Trump’s White House can’t help but stick onto everything. If the president opened a child care center in Wisconsin, his staff would find a way to claim it as a blow against jihadi terror.

Once in Hamburg, the president demonstrated America’s seriousness of purpose by saying nothing of note and letting his daughter sit at the principals’ table. (So much for Ivanka Trump’s assurances that she wasn’t planning to be involved in politics.) While Germany’s Angela Merkel politely allowed that national leaders can delegate their seats, one can only imagine the incandescent rage of conservatives had a President Hillary Clinton named her daughter to a White House position and then seated her among the leaders of the G-20. Instead, they pointed to Merkel’s politeness as a host, claiming that Trump’s embarrassing nepotism was not a big deal.

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But no one was really watching the G-20 meetings. Nor was there much focus on the protesters, who now attend these events the way kids used to follow the Grateful Dead on tour. No, the main attraction was the Trump-Putin meeting Friday, and it went as poorly as some of us feared.

First, Trump and his team lost control of events because they banned everyone but the principals and the translators from the room. In what looks like a vote of no-confidence in his own staff, the president is apparently now so concerned about leaks that he went into a mini summit without his top Russia expert or his national security adviser. This is not only risky but foolish, since these are the people who would need to analyze what happened later. Even the Russians wanted more people in the room, according to The New York Times, and it is a remarkable turn of events when the Kremlin fears transparency less than the White House.

Once the meeting was over, Russian television showed Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reading out the meeting. The White House, inexplicably, insisted on an awkward audio-only brief from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. This deprived Tillerson of some of the gravitas of a personal appearance, and once again made the Russians look more confident and open than the Americans.

Worse, the Russians immediately dropped a version of events that made Trump look weak. The president, they asserted, had indeed raised Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election — and been told off by Putin, who not only denied everything but also arrogantly demanded proof. Later, in a masterful bit of public trolling of the White House, Putin said he had convinced Trump that Russia was not involved.

The White House scrambled to insist that Trump talked tough, especially Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. But she wasn’t there and increasingly seems disconnected from Trump’s actual policies. The president's staff and even Tillerson, one of the few in the room, were not convincing.

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And now the administration is trying to assure the American public it will hold Putin accountable with an agreement to open a joint Russian-American cybersecurity center. This is an idea so ridiculous that even in Moscow they must be wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. A major goal of U.S. cybersecurity policy should be defending against the Russians, not handing them the keys to our computers and explaining our strategy to them as though they are a trusted ally. (As Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., put it, this would be like partnering with the Syrians to form an anti-chemical weapons unit.)

In summary, the G-20 “successes” were: a competent speech in Warsaw that nonetheless contained the usual dog whistles to authoritarians and white nationalists; a humiliating absence of leadership in Hamburg (except for the brief unveiling of Princess Regent Ivanka); an American team woefully unprepared and understaffed for the president’s first meeting with his Russian counterpart; a narrative of the meeting now controlled by the Kremlin; the Americans giving a pass to the most brazen Russian attack on U.S. political institutions ever; and a cybersecurity proposal so inane it beggars belief.

A smashing success, perhaps, for Trump loyalists who either don’t know any better or who must disingenuously keep pushing the party line against reality itself. For the rest of us, it was exactly the collapse of the American amateurs in the face of the Russian professionals we predicted — and feared.

Tom Nichols, a Russia specialist and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, is the author ofThe Death of Expertise. The views expressed here are solely his own. Follow him on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom

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