President Donald Trump is undermining his own United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, over the issue of additional sanctions against Russia.
The president has decided that he doesn't want to add further economic sanctions to Russia in response to its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's engagement in a chemical weapons attack against his own people, according to The Washington Post. After Haley proclaimed on Sunday that new sanctions were being prepared and would be announced by Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, Trump complained to his national security advisers later that day that he was uncomfortable with applying additional pressure on Russia.
"So you will see that Russian sanctions will be coming down," Haley told CBS' "Face the Nation," in a segment that aired on Sunday. "Secretary Mnuchin will be announcing those on Monday if he hasn't already and they will go directly to any sort of companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and chemical weapons use. And so I think everyone is going to feel it at this point. I think everyone knows that we sent a strong message and our hope is that they listen to it."
Earlier in the interview, Haley had explained that the decision to engage in military action against Syria had been as a result of "cumulative" offenses by the Assad regime, pointing out that "we had up until this point had six different resolutions that would have dealt with investigative mechanisms for chemical weapons. And Russia had vetoed all of them." As a result, she felt that the Trump administration had exhausted its diplomatic options and that "it was time for action. And I think one thing that we hope Assad got the message on is the international community will not allow chemical weapons to come back into our everyday life. And the fact that he was making this more normal and that Russia was covering it up all of that has to stop."
Officials believe that Trump is unlikely to apply additional sanctions against Russia unless the nation does something else to trigger them.
Russia also made it clear they were not happy with the American sanctions against them and declared that they considered it appropriate for them to respond to those measures in any way they see fit, according to Reuters.
"The sanctions drive against Russia is becoming an idée fixe. We still consider these sanctions illegal . . . and we’re convinced that any economist can see open attempts to squeeze Russian companies out of global markets," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
He added, "It’s nothing more than an international asset grab."
Despite its protestations of victimhood, on Monday it was revealed that Russia has increased the level of its cyberattacks against the United States and United Kingdom. The two nations issued a rare joint statement warning that Russia was using compromised computer network equipment to attack American and British companies and government agencies, according to Bloomberg.
"Russian state-sponsored actors are using compromised routers to conduct spoofing ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks to support espionage, extract intellectual property, maintain persistent access to victim networks and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations. Multiple sources including private and public-sector cybersecurity research organizations and allies have reported this activity to the U.S. and U.K. governments," the joint statement explained.
Although the Trump administration has insisted that Haley made a misstatement, many insiders believe that isn't what happened. As the Post reports:
But other administration officials expressed skepticism that Haley had merely misspoken. They said Haley is one of the most disciplined and cautious members of the Cabinet, especially when it comes to her public appearances. She regularly checks in with Trump personally to go over her planned statements before she sits for television interviews.
Vanity Fair also pointed out that Trump has seemed to go out of his way to thwart the other members of his administration when they attempt to hold Russia accountable:
The tension between Trump and his government has resulted in what are, effectively, two separate Russia strategies: one pursued by the president, and one by his administration. On Monday, the president and his Cabinet butted heads again, with Trump throwing cold water on preliminary plans to impose additional economic sanctions on Russia, announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump, according to the Post, told his national-security advisers that he was not comfortable with how punitive they were. The least generous interpretation of that decision seems to speak for itself.
Trump's extensive ties to Russia, through both his business and political careers, have been exhaustively chronicled before. The main takeaway here, however, is that Trump is continuing to make policy decisions based on a desire to please Russia, despite the massive scandal surrounding that nation and its impact on his presidency. This is a president whose campaign and administration are the subject of an ongoing probe into whether they colluded with that hostile foreign power during the 2016 presidential election; a president who was strong-armed by a Congress controlled by his own party into signing a Russia sanctions bill; a president whose seemingly obsequious desire to be liked by President Vladimir Putin has made him the butt of jokes throughout the world.
And yet he persists in undermining American policy interests — and taking a soft approach toward Russia, which he does with virtually no other country — over and over again.
"Trump seems to think that if he accepts what his advisers recommend on even days of the month and rejects their recommendations on odd days, the result will be a strategy. By and large, other governments don’t know whether to laugh or cry at all this. But in Russia, laughter is getting the upper hand," Stephen Sestanovich, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia University who worked as an ambassador to former Soviet states in the 1990s, told The New York Times.
Russia may be laughing, but if nothing else, Trump's actions on the economic sanctions underscore why the Robert Mueller investigation is so important. There is a big question mark regarding Trump's actions toward Russia, and the American people deserve to have an answer.
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