OPINION:
John Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, has completed a meeting in Moscow to talk about an agenda for the Trump-Putin agenda later this month in Helsinki, and the talk was about “strategic stability in the world, control over nuclear weapons and, in general, a disarmament dossier.”
A spokesman for the Russians says they also talked about the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, uncertainty in North Korea and the Iran nuclear deal. Neither Mr. Bolton nor the Russian spokesman said whether there were discussions of Russian meddling in American elections. The guess here is there were not.
Washington swallowed hard, and despite mumbled protests from its European allies, agreed to ignore for the moment Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea, his support of armed pro-Russian dissidents in Eastern Ukraine, and growing threats to nations on the Baltic that were once captured by the old Soviet Union. Neither, apparently, did anyone say anything about the offstage presence hovering over the summit, like carrion.
That would be China, whose expanding ambitions in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa pose a threat to the interests of both the United States and China. China is nevertheless very much a part of the international balance of power that is implied in any deal that comes out of a Putin-Trump summit. Like U.S.-Russian summits in times past, this one requires bitter compromise, swallowed with difficulty by the allied nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that has kept the peace in Europe for decades.
Mr. Putin is no Josef Stalin, as some overheated rhetoric would have it in these times when overheated rhetoric is the language of the realm, but his combination of political thuggery — he is, after all, a graduate of the once-dreaded KGB, the Soviet/Russian secret police — and murder of political opponents is a fact.
Dealing with Moscow has since the darker days of the Cold War meant that Washington has to face the reality of an aggressor regime with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Until recently Russia held a whip over the NATO allies in Europe as the monopoly supplier of natural gas.
But times change. Washington can deal now with a Moscow with an eroding economic weapon. New shale technology has made the United States a net exporter of oil and gas for the first time since before World War II. With Central Asian energy reserves no longer the property of a Soviet Union, and the new pipelines under construction through Turkey and the Balkans, together with a new energy player in Mozambique, Mr. Putin cannot expect to ride as high on his horse as he once did. There’s hope for everyone on the eve of the summit.
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