By Securing A Summit With Trump, Putin Has Already Won

By securing a summit with Trump, Putin has already won. For the US president, there is little to gain even if he strikes a deal with his Russian counterpart.

- Anita Pratap

Oa a wet, windy, wintry day in the planet’s northernmost capital, Reykjavik in Iceland, a noble bromance blossomed between the world’s two most powerful men. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev shared the romantic vision of a world without nuclear weapons. Analysts suspect the current bromance between their successors is ignoble. It certainly is hard to spot a lofty vision shared by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as they meet in another North European capital, Finland’s Helsinki.

Nobody knows exactly why Trump so loves Putin. Analysts claim lucrative business deals, sexual exploits and blackmail are the reasons Trump behaves like Putin’s stooge, despite mounting evidence of Russian cyber warfare, espionage and meddling in US elections.

This is an asymmetric summit. Putin has everything to gain, Trump has nothing to lose—or gain. Columnist Leonid Bershidsky says “Putin has nothing to offer the US as there is no part of the Trump agenda that Russia could help advance”. On the other hand, Putin has already won—like North Korean dictator Kim Jongun—in just having a summit with the world’s most powerful man. Observes former CIA officer Daniel Hoffman: “Putin wants to be perceived as an equal to the United States, even though his economy is the size of Italy’s. He certainly doesn’t have the weight to throw around that the Soviet Union had, but he wants to be perceived that way and perceived to be defending Russia, the besieged fortress, from immoral western ideas and military threats.”