Garrett Campbell
The pro-Russian tack taken by the Trump administration seems puzzling and even counterproductive to most Americans, to say nothing of our NATO allies and global partners. Recent polling shows a majority of Americans do not trust Putin, that there remains majority support among Americans for Ukraine, and that Americans reject the idea of abandoning NATO or our leadership position among our alliances and partnerships. Why, then, is the Trump administration’s messaging disconnected from domestic and international audiences?
It is not so puzzling when one considers it in the context of the first Trump administration’s major foreign policy goal of driving a wedge between Russia and China. While there may be dismay at Trump’s pro-Putin turn, pursuing a Sino-Russian schism is on par with what he and other Republican presidential candidatessaid they were going to do. Trump was explicit in his intent to return to this policy. The current Trump administration faces a growing dilemma beyond the failures of the first administration’s policy efforts that sought to create a schism but only solidified the strategic partnership in ways not seen throughout history. None of the conditions to effect such a division existed then, nor do they exist today. The two strategic partners spent nearly two decades ensuring they were aligned to prevent such a schism, so pursuing an ill-informed initiative made failure virtually inevitable. The factors that bind them now exist in spades, making another effort to divide the Sino-Russian strategic partnership even more likely doomed to failure. Worse, in zealously reimplementing a failed policy, it is clear Trump’s team has done so without evaluating and assessing why it failed in the first place. Seemingly obtuse to the realities of the relationship, they have decided to court Putin at the expense of our alliances and partnerships. This has committed the US to a potentially self-destructive geopolitical road to failure.
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