The Alarming Surrender in Helsinki

A photograph says it all. It’s from Reuters and was taken by Kevin Lamarque. Monday, July 16, in the presidential palace of Helsinki. The presidents of the United States and Russia are holding a press conference after two hours of side-by-side conversation, alone with the interpreters. Vladimir Putin, who’s just given Donald Trump a souvenir ball from the World Cup, smiles cunningly while the American president pats the ball.

The Russian leader is satisfied; he didn’t even have to play the match that was this summit. Inexplicably, Trump gave the match to him, in an alarming surrender reminiscent of the disgraceful day in 1938 when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler in Munich, a meeting that resulted in the handover of the Sudetenland, a region of the former Czechoslovakia, to Nazi Germany. It was sold as “peace for our time.” What better way for Putin to show the world that, for reasons we don’t know and which American prosecutors may someday reveal, Trump is in his pocket. Trump admires his Russian counterpart, and gets along better with him than with his NATO allies, whom he just humiliated in Brussels.

Putin’s goal is to cut Europe off from the United States. And Trump allows this policy of Finlandization, a term he presumably doesn’t know.* To Trump, Russia isn’t guilty. Not of the annexation of Crimea, or the destabilization of Ukraine, or the shooting down of a civilian airliner with a Russian missile or Moscow’s interference in the American presidential elections.

He attributes the terrible relationship between the U.S. and Russia to the foolishness of Washington, American intelligence services, and the American media’s “witch hunt.” But Trump’s no Ronald Reagan, and Putin’s no Mikhail Gorbachev. Those two leaders ended the Cold War over the course of four well-prepared summits – Geneva, Reykjavik, Moscow and Washington – that relied on the advice of experts. The disgraceful Helsinki summit, another theatrical performance like the Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un, confirms the geopolitical turn the U.S. has taken. Trump first, America next, and to hell with the rest of the world, including allies, which he equates with the enemy. It will be difficult and costly, but Europe, caught between Putin and Trump, must prepare its future without the United States. That great country is getting a failing grade in terms of being an example of a healthy democracy.

The international delirium we’re witnessing is part of the era of strongmen leaders we are enduring. It’s a real plague, encouraged by the Trump model. From Putin to Xi Jinping in China, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Illiberal democracies all of them, fueled by populism and the fear of the “Other.” Reports of the death of democracy, as Mark Twain would say, have been greatly exaggerated, but democracy does need to be cultivated and defended.

*Editor’s note: Finlandization is a term used to describe the process of being obliged for economic reasons to favor, or at least not oppose, the interest of the form Soviet Union despite not being politically allied with it.