Trump's oily and obnoxious personality sorely tests British diplomacy

Extract from The Guardian

Donald Trump

The contradictory US president’s inclination is to side with those who want to break up the EU

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

Sat 14 Jul 2018 02.49 AEST Last modified on Sat 14 Jul 2018 06.59 AEST

Donald Trump with the Queen at Windsor Castle. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

 

Donald Trump’s Jekyll and Hyde performance on the opening leg of his European tour – one minute angrily wielding a wrecking ball and the next playing the oleaginous anglophile – will hardly leave European diplomats, especially those in Britain, reassured as they brace themselves for his bilateral summit with Vladimir Putin on Monday.
It is this meeting – the two men have met only two and a half times before according to Trump’s own arithmetic – that contains the most serious risk to the battered western alliance.

After Friday’s press conference with Theresa May in which he rowed back on some of the more incendiary remarks he made about Brexit in his interview with the Sun, British officials were reassured the US president can be chastened, if not cowed, when confronted by the damage he has wreaked. But they cannot know whether Trump, restored by two days on the Scottish links, will regain his bullish self confidence as the master deal-maker by the time he reaches the Russian president in Helsinki.

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It is clear from the past two days that Trump’s inclination is to side with those who want to break up the European Union, while he at least regards Nato’s survival as a matter for discussion. But if Trump is to go the next stage in weakening the EU as an institution, the meeting with Putin will be critical.
Indeed, UK officials said some of the most searching exchanges between Britain and the US over the past two days had been to try to set some red lines on the concessions Trump might make. A two-page communique is apparently being prepared for Helsinki and may contain statements not to interfere in one another’s elections. The value of such commitments will be questionable given Russia’s refusal to accept responsibility for its interference in 2016.

The difficulty for the EU is that the US policy towards Russia is contradictory. Trump claimed he was tougher on Russia than anybody and has some supporting evidence, including ejecting Russian diplomats in response to the poisoning of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.

But it is also clear that Trump craves a different relationship with Moscow, predicting that the Putin meeting may be easier than any he held with his actual allies in Britain or Brussels. Over the past two days, he has repeatedly said Putin is not his friend, but his competitor, but it is clear it is his aspiration to strike up such a friendship and is prepared to make concessions to achieve this.
The big prize is a revised nuclear arms treaty. Trump spoke of substantially reducing or even getting rid of nuclear weapons, adding it was a subject he would certainly bring up with Putin. “The proliferation is a tremendous, I mean to me, it’s the biggest problem in the world, nuclear weapons, biggest problem in the world.”

He also hinted he might acknowledge Russia’s claim to Crimea, pointing to the investment Putin has made. At Nato, he also said he was open to stopping Nato military exercises in the Baltic states, a request Putin is likely to make.
The terms for the withdrawal of 2,000 American troops still in Syria, including any matching requirement demanded by Israel for the withdrawal of Iranian backed troops, is also another concern of European diplomats struggling to understand Trump’s Syria policy.
One British official insists even now it will be self-defeating to play up the threat Trump poses to the transatlantic alliance. “He is going to come in hard on anything that has dollar signs attached to them, like troops or burden sharing. But one issue does not necessarily have a read across to another”.

But never has Britain’s pragmatic approach to diplomacy been so sorely tested.