Fully aware of the blowback I can get for some of the comments I’m about to make, let me be very clear up front that I think Donald Trump is an outrageous president (more on that later). His behavior and public comments in Helsinki only confirm this assessment in my mind. The main question America now appears to be debating is does Trump’s outrageous character, speech and behavior pose an existential threat to American institutions, and the international institutions we are a part of?
The amazingly rapid conventional wisdom that congealed in the 24 hours following the Helsinki Summit would suggest that Trump is indeed that threat. While I agree with the outrageous nature of his summit diplomacy, I can’t say I agree with the hyperbolic response. This isn’t because I like Trump or how he does foreign policy. I can’t stand either. But there’s a broader context that has gone missing in terms of assessing the summit. Against that backdrop of international relations theory, here are 10 observations on Helsinki, it’s actors, and potential effects.
We only know what we know… and that’s not much
The context of the summit was two hours of closed conversation between Presidents Trump and Putin, followed by a working lunch between them and their teams, followed by a roughly 45 minute press conference. A hundred percent of the outrage in the American press is focused on that public component of the summit which comprises less than a quarter of the time actually spent. We need to be careful reading too much into such public comments. For better or worse, a good deal of diplomacy and foreign policy happens out of the public eye.
Defining the difference between interference, influence, and collusion
The conflation of these terms when it comes to discussing the role of Russian meddling in American elections is a very concerning trend I see becoming the defining point of Russian-American relations. However, finding the right word to describe that interaction is really important for helping us get our heads wrapped around the seriousness of this one component of relations with Russia.
If it’s interference this is merely status quo. Russia has a long history of being a country that seeks to interfere and influence political processes in the United States in the days of the Cold War, and in European countries then and now.
If collusion is the main descriptive term and proven charge then, this is serious insofar as it demands impeachment and prosecution of Trump and anyone on his team having anything to do with it. However, it hardly merits a constitutional crisis as the Constitution has clearly delineated processes for handling this sort of thing.
The really important question here is also the hardest one to answer and that is assessing to what degree did Russian meddling in the election actually influenced the election in Donald Trump’s favor? It’s not enough to say he won therefore Russian interference was successful. A causal link must be established and the Russian variable must be shown to be the most significant factor in influencing the election’s outcome. This is the most important question of the three and requires closer evaluation because if Russia is capable of exercising that level of influence, then American democracy is truly under grave threat.
Summit diplomacy should never be discussed in terms of wins and losses
A lot of criticism surrounding Trump’s rhetoric and behavior at the Helsinki and NATO summits is being discussed in terms of wins and losses. This is entirely the wrong way to evaluate a summit and its success. Summits are brief meeting points in otherwise long journeys that last beyond a president’s term of office because the relationship between the two countries remains regardless of who the chief executive is.
This means it’s difficult to assess wins or losses immediately, only time will tell. Public face and national prestige could be lost in a moment and that certainly happened in Helsinki. However, to suggest that this is one of the worst such moments in American diplomatic history is naive, short sighted and ignores a long line of diplomatic body blows that America has taken in the past .
There are multiple interpretations to what Trump said
Perhaps the comment that has received the most criticism was Trump’s off-the-cuff comment seeming to deny his own intelligence community’s assessment of Russian involvement in American elections. in the quote, it appeared that Trump chose to accept the denial of Putin over the words of his own intelligence community.
However, in looking at the quote I realize that there’s multiple ways to interpret this. First, it’s important to note that this was an impromptu, off-the-cuff comment, which means that someone as inarticulate as our president has a high probability of misspeaking (which is the exact walk back strategy he is taking).
Two, it could be read as a simple statement of “one person is this and one person is saying that.”
Third, acknowledging he has no reason to disbelieve Putin doesn’t mean that he won’t have reason to disbelieve him in the future.
Admittedly, it’s hard to acknowledge such a scenario in which that happens, but it’s also helpful to think through the many potential ways this comment could be understood.
The absence of grand strategy
This is a recurring theme in Foreign Affairs magazine, one of the prominent publications on international relations. During the Obama administration and into the Trump administration there has been an ongoing concern echoed by practitioners and scholars of diplomacy and international relations that America lacks any kind of unifying grand strategy to organize its foreign policy priorities.
Helsinki is what happens as a natural consequence of this lack of strategy: it’s not read either by the president or by the public in a broader global context, but merely in terms of theatrics and zero sum gain relations with one country without any reference to the global playing field on which the two compete.
The role of personal relationships in geopolitics
In the field of international relations there’s an ongoing debate among conflict scholars on the role of individual actors and their ability to move countries in different directions.
More quantitatively minded theorists look at macro trends of economics, social factors and political developments. Personal relationships are believed to have a marginal effect at best but don’t fundamentally move the needle on relationships between two countries. In this context misspeaking at a summit hardly matters in the long term. It’s a short-term speed bump on an otherwise longer road.
However, political psychologists argue that individual actors absolutely can matter in that they can move or withhold the resources at their disposal to amplify or undercut relationships with different countries. This perspective obviously dominates the current assessments of Donald Trump but it is not the only perspective in the political science field and this is being unfortunately overlooked and diminishing our ability to keep perspective.
In international relations, context matters
Looking at the broader context of US-Russia relations, we see an increasingly aggressive Russia dovetailing an increasingly fraught relationship with United States. It’s an interesting chicken or the egg situation. Was it the fraught relationship that led to Russian aggression or the other way around? Russia has certainly justified much of its aggression since 2008 at least by pointing to the threat posed by increasing NATO expansion. But America’s geopolitical and strategic concerns have also played role in limiting confrontation with Russia.
If that’s the case, then getting communication channels open especially between heads of state is really important. That makes this summit at some level a success, at least in terms of the apparently relaxed interaction between the two leaders. That certainly has not been seen in the George Bush or Obama eras when relations with Russia were indifferent at best.
Trump: Disease, symptom or medicine?
These are interesting metaphors to consider because they emphasize different elements of Trump’s foreign policy. If Trump is a disease that means he’s a causal factor, moving American foreign policy in particular directions like dismantling the transatlantic alliance.
However, if he’s merely a symptom, then he’s as much a causal agent as he is a caused agent. In other words his election, and his manner and method of foreign policy grows out of a certain political and cultural context. That context has been a transatlantic alliance riven by disagreements on strategy, massive economic crashes and losses, and the rise of the populist political forces.
An alternative perspective is that Trump is the medicine. Some scholars say he’s the medicine needed to reinvigorate NATO out of its post-cold War malaise and lack of vision. Bitter tasting medicine to be sure, but necessary depending on who you ask.
The Jacksonian conundrum
Walter Russell Mead has a fantastic way of assessing the success of Donald Trump and that is by acknowledging that his base of support is largely Jacksonian in its cultural orientation. This finds its basis in a theoretical argument that Mead makes in which he breaks up America’s foreign policy thinking into four schools of thought: Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian.
The Jacksonian school is made up of Americans who have a distinct dislike for elites, both political and economic, and who are fiercely patriotic and therefore hate seeing America lose face or honor on the global stage.
A big question coming out of this particular summit is how will the Jacksonian base respond to Trump? Their anti-elite attitude would suggest defending him against the decidedly bipartisan elite blowback. However, their very patriotic sense of honor could push back on Trump and might force him to temper his words. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Weighing public rhetoric and public policy
The overwhelming emphasis coming out of Trump’s European barnstorming tour is that Trump’s rhetoric is single-handedly dismantling NATO and giving Russia a strategic advantage. However, the NATO Brussels Summit Declaration that came out as an agreed-upon document by all heads of state and parties in NATO indicate that there remains broad areas of agreement that moved the alliance forward in some important areas.
So even though there’s very public confrontations, disagreements and offensive words, almost all entirely caused by President Trump, the alliance still seems to be functioning and moving forward. So it stands to reason when looking at US-Russia relations that while Trump continues to foment controversy and consternation that doesn’t exactly tell the whole story.
The more interesting question is what should we be focusing on in public discourse and journalism? Should it be entirely focused on rhetoric, should it be balanced between rhetoric and policy, or should be focused entirely on policy? It should probably be a mix of the two which should inform the content that we’re consuming.
The outrageous president
As I said above, the more I observe the Trump administration the more I come to the conclusion that “outrageous” is the best word to describe President Trump. Love him or hate him there is no denying his outrageous words and actions. The big question for me is how much do they matter in the short, medium and long terms? How we answer that question reveals much about how we view the institutions of American government, their relative strength and importance, and our own relationship to them.
While it’s tempting to be caught up in the outrage over Trump’s public comments at the Helsinki summit, I’m finding that there are deeper, bigger questions to consider that are far more interesting, important, and influential than the unprepared comments made by an ill prepared president.