President Donald Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, seemed genuinely awestruck by their latest tête-à-tête with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Witkoff gushed that these meetings rank at “the top” of his life’s experiences. Both men talk of Russia as a potential partner and approach the country as businessmen who, like Trump, seek “win-win” solutions with Putin.
So it is worth recalling a lesson about Putin learned by another businessman turned government official — Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs. As treasury secretary, Paulson visited Beijing for the Olympics in August 2008, just as the global financial crisis was gathering force and markets were increasingly worried about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant institutions that guarantee most mortgages in the United States.
In Beijing, Paulson received news that, he said, “took my breath away.” Russian officials had approached China and proposed that the two countries jointly dump large quantities of Fannie and Freddie securities. The aim was to intensify the pressure on the already-teetering American economy, probably pushing it off the edge. China declined.
Think about what this says. At a moment when the American financial system was approaching its worst crisis since the Great Depression, Putin was searching for ways to hit America when it was down — even though a deeper American crash would inevitably have damaged the rest of the world, including Russia. Putin appeared willing to risk a lose-lose outcome, as long as the U.S. lost badly.
That is close to the opposite of how a businessman thinks. But Putin has never claimed to be a businessman searching for deals. He is a Russian nationalist seeking to restore the power and territory lost with the collapse of the Russian and Soviet empires, even as his country recedes economically, demographically and politically on the world stage.
One wonders what it would take for the administration to recognize that Putin has spent years pursuing a foreign policy aimed at weakening America and its influence. Consider Trump’s war with Iran. Which great power has been Iran’s greatest military ally? Russia has supplied Tehran with advanced aircraft, tanks and a slew of other weapons. It shares intelligence and sends American weapons found on the Ukrainian battlefield to Iran so that Tehran can reverse engineer them and use them against the U.S. The Financial Times recently revealed that Russia has been secretly helping Iran develop ramjet-powered supersonic cruise missiles capable of threatening American aircraft carriers. These are not weapons for some abstract geopolitical game. They are designed to defeat American defenses and kill American soldiers.
Trump has a vision of a Western Hemisphere in which the U.S. reigns supreme. Which great power has spent years working against that vision? Between 2001 and 2018, Russia accounted for more than 70 percent of Venezuela’s arms imports. Now the Trump administration has its eyes on Cuba and Nicaragua. Cuba’s military inventory is primarily Russian, as is Nicaragua’s.
The pattern extends to Africa, where Moscow has used arms, money, political support and mercenaries to expand its influence and displace the West. The Wagner Group began as an instrument operating alongside Russian state power and became a vehicle for Moscow’s ambitions from Libya to the Sahel. Russia has also deepened its military partnerships with North Korea and China, the two other nuclear powers that regard the U.S. as their principal strategic adversary.
The Trump administration’s approach to ending the Russia-Ukraine war has been to basically take Moscow’s side in the conflict. Trump has falsely said that Ukraine started the war and called President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator. His administration has conceded several Russian positions in advance: that Ukraine will not join NATO, that much of the territory Russia has seized will not be returned, and that the size of Ukraine’s military needs to be limited.
American military assistance has dwindled, while the U.S. had for a time suspended vital intelligence sharing. Ukrainian generals and soldiers I spoke with during my visit to Kyiv described the loss of American support as the greatest strategic blow their country has suffered since Russia’s invasion. Ukraine and its European partners have found ways to withstand and respond to Russian attacks. The more lasting damage, they fear, is American abandonment.
There is nothing wrong with seeking a deal with Putin, nor with wanting a settlement in which all sides gain something. But diplomacy begins with understanding the person across the table. Witkoff and Kushner see a businessman looking for a win-win. Putin’s record suggests that he is something very different: a man who has repeatedly been willing to impose costs on Russia, destabilize other countries and risk losses if doing so weakens the U.S.
Hank Paulson learned that lesson in Beijing 18 years ago. It would be useful if America’s current businessmen-diplomats learned it in Moscow.
The post The dangerous fantasy of a win-win with Putin appeared first on Washington Post.
