Kadri Liik
The view from the Kremlin
It was about half-way through the press conference when Donald Trump became agitated; cutting off reporters and talking over his co-speaker, Vladimir Putin. “What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone, just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily.” Even those following the event on Twitter could almost physically sense the horror engulfing the United States officials present. A very public embarrassment was unfolding before their very eyes, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. Fiona Hill, Trump’s Russia adviser at the time, later admitted that she had looked for a fire alarm to pull and considered faking a medical emergency, just to end it.
Karl Marx wrote (citing Hegel) that historical facts and individuals appear “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. One wonders, though, whether the opposite could also be true. The Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki in July 2018 sticks in the memory as the farcical apogee of a wobbly relationship: a rollercoaster of expectations and frustrations, ambitions and setbacks, but all in an often ludicrous atmosphere. Indeed, Trump’s erratic personality likely jolted his partners – including Putin – out of their habitual ways. It made them behave more cautiously and refrain from risk-taking.
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