What did the U.S. public see of two rival leaders this past weekend? President Donald Trump decamped to a New Jersey golf resort, where he tweeted a video showing him beating up a wrestler photo-shopped to represent CNN, before promising to continue his fight against fake news at an address to veterans at the Kennedy Center on Saturday night. Russian President Vladimir Putin kept a far lower profile, even choosing not to attend the final game of the Confederations Cup soccer tournament Sunday in St. Petersburg.
It’s hard not to imagine Putin, instead, poring over briefing books in preparation for Friday’s G-20 Conference in Hamburg. Hard, too, not to imagine the former FSB agent gearing up for what in Cold War-era espionage parlance would be termed a contact opportunity. For the Russian leader’s sideline meeting with Trump will give Putin a brief window of opportunity to take advantage of the U.S. leader’s acknowledged preference for a personalized politics and to forge a bond with a man who has been warned by many of his own advisers to talk tough or stay away.
Exactly what to expect from this meeting became a hot topic of opinion pieces and TV talk shows over the long weekend. Even as pundits deplored Trump’s recent “violent” and “vitriolic” tweets (bemoaning deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ comment that “when the president gets hit, he’s going to hit back harder”), others urged him, in relation to Putin, to do just that – to “act tough,” “not give any ground,” and put aside “his stated admiration for Mr. Putin’s strongman tendencies.” What such analysts overlook is that the U.S. has more than just the possibility of a renewed leadership “bromance” to fear.
Virtually any kind of meeting will play into Putin’s hands – the question is only to what degree? The Kremlin has already achieved a small measure of success, merely by fomenting controversy even within Trump’s administration over the issue. While White House officials seem to be scrambling to cast any interaction in brusque terms, Trump’s intention to meet with Putin at all can only be interpreted as a dismissive slap in the face to the entire U.S. intelligence establishment, which publicly accused the Kremlin of meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Thus, Russian overtures have already managed to widen a rift between the White House and many of the country’s career intelligence cadres – a division noticeably absent in other target countries of Russian interference such as Germany, where the political and intelligence communities have instead closed ranks to counter what both acknowledge to be a significant threat.
Putin could also work on fueling Trump’s sense of victimization at the hands of U.S. “mainstream media.” Both the Putin and Trump administrations have invoked similar rhetoric in recent weeks, decrying their positions as targets of “witch hunts” or “hysterical conspiracies” – for which, in both cases, U.S. establishment media is said to be to blame. Trump’s warning to supporters that “the fake media is trying to silence us” echoes the standard condemnations made by Kremlin-sponsored outlets such as RT of a “Western media bias” that blocks numerous stories from being heard. (Of course the Russians often portray Western media as suffering from a “neocon” distortion, while Trump calls it a “liberal” one – proof, perhaps, that in both cases the terms used are more labels of convenience than objective realities.)
At the same time, Putin will try to use his meeting with Trump to do more than simply exacerbate internal U.S. tensions. From Moscow's point of view, if the Russian leader can at least create the illusion of common cause – by honing in on the issues of fighting terrorism or containing North Korea – and thereby plant the seeds of White House opposition to any congressional efforts to impose further sanctions, then good. But this meeting is also part of what appears to be a new Kremlin PR initiative that, while it leaves the door open for future collaboration with the U.S. president, focuses on promoting a vision of Putin that is not grounded in his similarities to Trump (i.e., two strong populist leaders) but rather in their alleged dramatic differences.
Once held up as a refreshing, business-first alternative to a despised Hillary Clinton, Trump is now being cast in the Russian media as an unpredictable and adolescent danger to global peace, everything a wise and measured statesman such as Putin is not. Careful to protect Putin’s image from mockery, the Russian press is more and more often willing to portray the current U.S. leader as a clown, or at least to cite others – like the Argentinian soccer star Diego Maradona – who do so.
This contrast is brought into ever sharper relief by Russian politicians and journalists who are drawing on Cold War tropes to explain America’s role in the world. A typical Soviet cartoon from the days of the post-World War II Marshall Plan portrays the U.S. as a fat “Uncle Sam,” lounging in a boat off the European coast. His feet, propped on shore, are shaped like giant missiles and his fishing rod is baited with a dollar-shaped hook. The message: Money and military might are what truly underlie U.S. global ambitions. In the Russian media, that complacent Uncle Sam image could just as well represent Trump today.
Under Nikita Khrushchev in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union went one step further, explicitly attempting to claim the moral high ground from its Cold War rival. A standard cartoon from that era entitled “Two Worlds – Two Plans” depicts a young student-farmer pointing to a map of the USSR’s arable land as he reports on the successes of a spring seeding campaign. “We plant life,” the caption reads. Below, an American soldier points to a map of military targets. “They sow death,” reads the second caption line.
On Friday, the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry posted a speech to its website by minister Sergey Lavrov that similarly presented Russia as the country that is today willing to promote peace and global cooperation, even in the face of destabilizing and jingoistic American actions. We “must not, have not [the] right to waste our efforts … on squabbles, feuds and geopolitical games,” he warned an international audience. “What we need is wise and balanced approaches, without stakes on unilateral global domination and the vicious practice of ‘double standards.’”
In that same speech, Lavrov identified cyber-crime, terrorism and “the use of information and communications technologies to … manipulate public opinion” as the crucial issues of the day, while at the same time holding them up as consequences of a failed “West-centric” and “unipolar” model of globalization. Ironically, all of these are issues that U.S. political figures are urging Trump to champion. Lavrov’s speech demonstrates how Russian politicians are working to co-opt the United States’ own political platform, and to present Russia as a leader in finding solutions to global crises, rather than as a behind-the-scenes strategic orchestrator of them.
It’s just one more demonstration of how, in recent weeks, Russian messaging has gained a new coherence, largely in response to anxious global chatter about Trump’s actions at home and abroad. A Pew survey concluded that more people around the world trust Putin than do Trump. Oliver Stone put out a four-hour interview of Putin in which the two men watched “Dr. Strangelove” together and Putin mused about the dangers of war and importance of ensuring peace. Global media coverage of the Russian-hosted Confederations Cup conceded that international visitors found the Russians “welcoming” and “friendly,” and Kremlin-funded outlets have pointed out that this result flies in the face of “the negative predictions made by sections of the Western media beforehand.”
Thus, even as a disparate array of Russian hackers and “messaging” strategists work behind the scenes to undermine political stability overseas, Putin’s people appear to be setting their leader up as a Trump alternative – sober, loyal to his country’s interests, hardworking and willing to get things done by promoting “a peaceful, positive, and forward-looking agenda in international affairs” and acting as “a guarantor of global stability.” It’s a publicity campaign grounded in projecting Russian strength, in stark contrast to American weakness.
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