Donald Trump, the world’s greatest negotiator according to himself, may not think he needs much advice before his summit meeting in Alaska with Vladimir Putin on Friday. But the president should give Robert Kraft a call.
Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, knows what it’s like to be fleeced by the Russian president. On a visit to Russia in 2005 with U.S. business leaders, Kraft, at the urging of Citigroup’s then-chairman, Sandy Weill, showed Putin one of his $25,000 Super Bowl rings.
“And he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’” Kraft recounted in 2013. “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three K.G.B. guys got around him and walked out.” Kraft said he was urged by the Bush administration to pretend the ring had been a gift, while Putin later mocked Kraft’s complaint and suggested that the ring was embarrassingly cheap.
Petty crooks sometimes become big-time ones, and Putin’s career is a case in point — from reports of pilfering high-tech secrets from the West as a K.G.B. agent in East Germany to suspicions about corrupt contracts while a mayoral deputy in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, orchestrating electoral theft in Russia and electoral meddling abroad, plundering the Russian economy and seizing territory from Georgia and now Ukraine.
This is not grand strategy at work. It’s grand larceny. It’s the essence of what Putin is about — and surely helps explain Trump’s long-held admiration for him.
Still, Trump probably will not want to reprise his performance at the 2018 Helsinki summit, where he swallowed Putin’s assurances that there had been no Russian meddling in the 2016 election and embarrassed the still embarrassable Republican Party. He may also be conscious that some of his predecessors made fools of themselves in past Russia summits, including George W. Bush (“I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul”) and Barack Obama (“After my election I have more flexibility,” he said to Putin’s front-office man Dmitri Medvedev).
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