{"id":114230,"date":"2019-01-22T07:50:18","date_gmt":"2019-01-22T11:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=114230"},"modified":"2019-01-22T07:51:19","modified_gmt":"2019-01-22T11:51:19","slug":"anti-trump-frenzy-threatens-to-end-superpower-diplomacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=114230","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Trump Frenzy Threatens to End Superpower Diplomacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Baseless Russiagate allegations continue to risk war with Russia.<\/strong><\/h1>\n

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President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, July 7, 2017. (Reuters \/ Carlos Barria)<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

By Stephen F. Cohen<\/p>\n

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T<\/span>he New Year has brought a torrent of ever-more-frenzied allegations that President Donald Trump has long had a conspiratorial relationship\u2014why mince words and call it \u201ccollusion\u201d?\u2014with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n

Why the frenzy now? Perhaps because Russiagate promoters in high places are concerned that special counsel Robert Mueller will not produce the hoped-for \u201cbombshell\u201d to end Trump\u2019s presidency. Certainly,\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0columnist David Leonhardt<\/a>\u00a0seems worried, demanding, \u201cThe president must go,\u201d his drop line exhorting, \u201cWhat are we waiting for?\u201d (In some countries, articles like his, and there are very many, would be read as calling for a coup.) Perhaps to incite Democrats who have now taken control of House investigative committees. Perhaps simply because Russiagate has become a political-media cult that no facts, or any lack of evidence, can dissuade or diminish.<\/p>\n

And there is no new credible evidence, preposterous claims notwithstanding. One of\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u2019\u00a0own recent \u201cbombshells,\u201d<\/a>published on January 12, reported, for example, that in spring 2017, FBI officials \u201cbegan investigating whether [President Trump] had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.\u201d None of the three reporters bothered to point out that those \u201cagents and officials\u201d almost certainly included ones later reprimanded and retired by the FBI itself for their political biases. (As usual, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0buried its self-protective disclaimer deep in the story: \u201cNo evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Whatever the explanation, the heightened frenzy is unmistakable, leading the \u201cnews\u201d almost daily in the synergistic print and cable media outlets that have zealously promoted Russiagate for more than two years, in particular the\u00a0Times<\/em>,\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>, MSNBC, CNN, and their kindred outlets. They have plenty of eager enablers, including the once-distinguished Strobe Talbott, President Bill Clinton\u2019s top adviser on Russia and until recently president of the Brookings Institution.\u00a0According to Talbott<\/a>, \u201cWe already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker\u2026. Trump has been colluding with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency.\u201d In fact, we do not \u201cknow\u201d any of this. These remain merely widely disseminated suspicions and allegations.<\/p>\n

In this cult-like commentary, the \u201cthreat\u201d of \u201ca hostile Russia\u201d must be inflated along with charges against Trump. (In truth, Russia represents no threat to the United States that Washington itself did not provoke since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.) For its own threat inflation, the\u00a0Times<\/em>featured not an expert with any plausible credentials but Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer with no known Russia expertise, and who was one of those reprimanded by the agency for anti-Trump political bias. Nonetheless,\u00a0the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0quotes Page at length<\/a>: \u201cIn the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability\u2026to spread our democratic ideals.\u201d Perhaps we should have guessed that the democracy-promotion genes of J. Edgar Hoover were still alive and breeding in the FBI, though for the\u00a0Times<\/em>, in its exploitation of the hapless and legally endangered Page, it seems not to matter.<\/p>\n

Which brings us, or rather Russiagate zealots, to the heightened \u201cthreat\u201d represented by \u201cPutin\u2019s Russia.\u201d If true, we would expect the US president to negotiate with the Kremlin leader, including at summit meetings, as every president since Dwight Eisenhower has done. But, we are told, we cannot trust Trump to do so, because,\u00a0according to\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em><\/a>, he has repeatedly met with Putin alone, with only translators present, and concealed the records of their private talks, sure signs of \u201ctreasonous\u201d behavior, as the Russiagate media first insisted following the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to know whether this is historical ignorance or Russiagate malice, though it is probably both. In any event, the truth is very different. In preparing US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits since the 1950s, aides on both sides have arranged \u201cprivate time\u201d for their bosses for two essential reasons: so they can develop sufficient personal rapport to sustain any policy partnership they decide on; and so they can alert one another to constraints on their policy powers at home, to foes of such d\u00e9tente policies often centered in their respective intelligence agencies. (The KGB ran operations against Nikita Khrushchev\u2019s d\u00e9tente policies with Eisenhower, and, as is well established, US intelligence agencies have run operations against Trump\u2019s proclaimed goal of \u201ccooperation with Russia.\u201d)<\/p>\n

That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the \u201csecrecy of presidential private meetings\u2026has been the rule, not the exception.\u201d He continues, \u201cThere\u2019s nothing unusual about withholding information from the bureaucracy about the president\u2019s private meetings with foreign leaders\u2026. Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not.\u201d Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US \u201cbureaucracy,\u201d sometimes met privately with Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev\u2019s translator was present.<\/p>\n

Nor should we forget the national-security benefits that have come from private meetings between US and Kremlin leaders. In October 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met alone with their translators and an American official who took notes\u2014the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished. The result, in 1987, was the first and still only treaty abolishing an entire category of such weapons, the exceedingly dangerous intermediate-range ones. (This is the historic treaty Trump has said he may abrogate.)<\/p>\n

And yet, congressional zealots are now threatening to subpoena the American translator who was present during Trump\u2019s meetings with Putin. If this recklessness prevails, it will be the end of the nuclear-superpower summit diplomacy that has helped to keep America and the world safe from catastrophic war for nearly 70 years\u2014and as a new, more perilous nuclear arms race between the two countries is unfolding. It will amply confirm a thesis set out in my book\u00a0War with Russia?<\/a><\/em>\u2014that anti-Trump Russiagate allegations have become the gravest threat to our security.<\/p>\n

The following correction and clarification were made to the original version of this article on January 17:\u00a0<\/strong>Reagan and Gorbachev met privately with translators during their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, not February, and Reagan was also accompanied by an American official who took notes. And it would be more precise to say that the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU and author of the new book\u00a0<\/em>War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate<\/a>. This commentary is based on the most recent of his weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War with the host of the John Batchelor radio show. (The podcast is\u00a0here<\/a>. Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at\u00a0<\/em>TheNation.com<\/a>.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

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