From left to right: Philip Rucker, Anton Troianovski and Seung Min Kim
- Trump says the US investigation of the election interference was a ‘disaster’ for the US. He attacked special counsel Robert S Mueller’s investigation.
- Putin said that although he did want Trump to win the 2016 election, be never interfered. He wanted Trump to win because he had talked about improving relations with Russia.
- There is a good quote from Trump: ‘Our relationship has never been worse than it is now. However, that changed, as of about four hours ago’.
- Trump blamed his own country, rather than Russia, for the hostilities between the two nations.
- Putin suggested what Trump described as an ‘interesting idea’: that special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s investigators could come to Russia and help question the dozen Russian suspects, as long as Russians could do the same of US intelligence agents that Moscow suspects of carrying out crimes on Russian soil. According to Radio Free Europe/Liberty, 3 days prior to the summit, 12 Russian military officers have been accused by Washington of ‘conspiring to meddle in the election campaign’ (rferl.org, 16.7.18).
- Trump also said: ‘Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing’.
- The initial one one on one meeting lasted 2 hours, although it was scheduled for 90 mins. At this private meeting there were no others present, with the exception of translators. There was an expanded meeting including others afterwards and the two followed on with a joint press conference lasting 46 minutes (Time, 16.7.18).
- A good quote from the writers of article: ‘Although most US officials argue that Russia’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election, use of a nerve agent on British soil and aggression in Ukraine and Syria have worsened relations, Trump instead faulted US foolishness and stupidity in tweets on Monday morning’. He also referred to the investigation as a ‘rigged witch hunt’.
- On NATO, Trump said that the alliance had ‘never been stronger than it is today’. On the summit in Brussels: ‘It was a little bit tough at the beginning but it turned out to be love’.
- Trump said that he had low expectations of the summit earlier today and that he intended it to be a meeting to foster better relations.
The meeting has since been heavily criticised by many, even by people within the Republican party. Senator John McCain ran against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. During his campaign, Trump said that he didn’t like Senator McCain because he had been a prisoner of war and had been captured: not smart enough apparently because he had been captured. As if one has a choice during war.
McCain is the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He released a statement yesterday following the summit with Putin:
Senator John McCain, former Republican candidate for the presidency, although he never won it
‘Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naivety, egotism, false equivalence and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.
President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand p to Putin. He and Putin seemed to be speaking from the same script as the president made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world’.
You can read the rest of McCain’s statement below, along with a few other articles I had found on the summit, of which there are certainly no shortage. Despite all of the above criticism, the summit seems to have been ‘heavy on drama’ and ‘light on substance’ (Rferl.org, 16.7.18). Nothing was discussed in great detail of any significance and the focus was mainly on generating a good relationship going forward. Radio Free Europe also suggest that Trump knew exactly what he was doing by giving Putin a platform and that he was, in fact, appeasing the Russian leader.
An alternative perspective from Keir Giles, Senior Consulting Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House
Mr Giles is of the belief that it could have been worse and in fact, we got off lucky:
‘An unsupervised face to face meting with Putin, with no opportunities for other US officials to influence decisions, held the danger of far more damaging outcomes than the further discrediting of Trump himself’, (Chatham House expert comment, 17.7.18).
Here are some of the salient points from the expert comment by Mr Giles:
- At a previous summit meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump had already demonstrated his willingness to make sudden unilateral concessions that compromise the security of his allies. For Kim, Trump suspended the military exercises on the Korean peninsula without consulting or even notifying South Korea’ (America’s ally).
- There was ‘a significant danger that left to his own devices, [Trump] might have been persuaded by President Putin to do the same in the Baltic states and Poland, which would have provoked an immediate crisis between the United States and its NATO allies’. But he didn’t.
- Trump suggested a ‘moral equivalence between Russia and the United States’ (by accepting the blame on both sides for the tense relationship between Russian the US). ‘That in itself constitutes a major moral victory for President Putin, but it is by far not the worst possible outcome of a personal meeting between the two’.
- ‘It was plain from the press conference that President Putin has no need to be concerned about Trump as an adversary. Not only did Trump side with Putin against his own government, but he also entirely failed to address any of the other serious issues and disagreements between the two states’.
So all in all, although Trump is in the bad books in the United States, according to Keir Giles, it could have been much, much worse: such is the view of the writer for Radio Free Europe (who also refers to the expert comment by Mr Giles), in that ‘for the West, it could have been worse’ (Rferl.org, 16.7.18).
Whatever your thoughts are, you’re not going to be short of reading material. Just remember to look at all sides. Read who you like and who you don’t like. Look at the reports from different countries and from different sizes of the political spectrum. I know that Trump has made his mistakes and if I were Mrs May, I would be ensuring that I had allies in Europe right now as well as the US, but whatever you might say, trying to cement good relations is no bad thing. Things were not addressed, this is correct. But Trump’s allies would say that thing were never meant to be addressed at this meeting. It was supposed to create a rapport.
As to what happens now, we can but wait and see.
Sources and Further reading:
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. This is a source that I used at Kings College, London, when studying Russia. It is an excellent source and just gives a different perspective. ‘Analysts say Putin was a clear summit victor’, 16.7.18:
https://www.rferl.org/a/and-the-winner-is-analysts-say-putin-was-clear-summit-victor/29368601.html
The Atlantic, ‘Trump-Putin Meeting: How will Republicans react?’, 16.7.18:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/moment-of-decision/565289/
McCain’s statement yesterday, SASC Chairman John McCain on Trump-Putin meeting, 16.7.18:
Katie Reilly for Time Magazine, ‘Both Trump and Putin just denied meddling in the 2016 election. Here’s what they said’, 16.7.18;
http://time.com/5339830/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-summit-helsinki-meddling/
The Wall Street Journal, ‘What Putin Wants From Trump’, 16.7.18:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-putin-wants-from-trump-1531438340
President Trump’s news conference with Russia’s Putin, annotated
Keir Giles is a senior consulting fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, London. He is also a director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, a group of subject matter experts in Eurasian security. He spent the early 1990s in the former USSR. With the BBC Monitoring Service, he reported on political and economic affairs in the former Soviet Union for UK government customers. Here is his comment on the summit yesterday: ‘After Trump-Putin Summit, Europe should breathe a sigh of relief’, Chatham House, 17.7.18:
Feature image:
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/07/16/568319/Trump-Putin-hail-summit-say-dialogue-to-continue
Internal image:
Senator John Mccain, Washington Post, 16.7.18:
#HelsinkiSummit, @antontroian, @ChathamHouse, @KeirGiles, @Mike_Eckel, @PhilipRucker, @RFERL, @SenJohnMcCain, @seungminkim, @washingtonpost, Donald Trump, Finland, Helsinki, Russia, Summit, USA, Vladimir Putin
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