David Michael Miller
The eyes of the world were on Helsinki this week, where Presidents Trump and Putin held their first true summit. Trump’s reluctance to acknowledge Russia’s interference in the 2016 election will likely dominate headlines for a while. But another U.S./Russia meeting, held just a couple of weeks earlier, may prove even more historically significant than the Helsinki summit.
Our own Sen. Ron Johnson and seven of his fellow lawmakers were the Americans at the meeting, which was held in Moscow during the 4th of July holiday week. Their counterparts were members of the Russian Duma and various other government officials. While it is always good to see American leaders engaged in diplomacy, Johnson and his colleagues bungled this get-together dramatically, perhaps even dangerously. At the expense of American credibility, the delegation supplied the Putin Crime Family with a major propaganda coup.
Delegation leader Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) set an obsequious tone at the outset, suggesting to the Russians that “we are competitors, but we don’t necessarily need to be adversaries.” The point of the visit, said Shelby, was to “strive for a better relationship,” not “to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth.”
That very day, Shelby’s colleagues on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had released a report confirming that, during the 2016 election, the Russian government attempted to “sow discord” and “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.” Somehow, the Russian officials kept their faces straight as Shelby prattled on about “common interests.”
Sen. Johnson has been sharply critical of Russia in the past, and insists that the delegation broached election interference after the cameras left the meeting. “We pushed back hard. I think they’re certainly on notice that there should be no meddling in 2018.” But, in recalling the exchanges, Johnson almost sounds like he is taking the Russians’ part. “They don’t understand why their election interference has been blown up into such an issue [or] why the American public so supports punishing sanctions.” (Russia’s official position is that it did not interfere at all.) Johnson contends that election interference, while “serious” and “unacceptable,” is “not the greatest threat to our democracy. We’ve blown it way out of proportion.”
Maybe Johnson hasn’t been keeping up with developments. We know now that Russia’s 2016 attack on the U.S. was malicious and meticulously engineered. It has been reported, for example, that once Moscow’s information warriors determined that Donald Trump would lose, they resolved to abandon electioneering efforts and instead focus on stoking paranoia about voter fraud. And according to an indictment handed down July 13, Russian intelligence officials attempted to leverage “stolen documents pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement.” This was surely part of Russia’s ongoing attempt to stoke racial tensions in America.
Upon his return home, Johnson publicly questioned the current sanctions strategy. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to say that sanctions against Russia are really working all that well.” He did not suggest that sanctions be lifted altogether, and there is nothing inherently wrong with questioning their efficacy. But what a time to bring the issue up! He had just gotten an earful about sanctions from officials like Konstantin Kosachev, who is on a list of Russians who are sanctioned personally. Maybe the officials’ complaints had no influence on Johnson’s comments. But as with so many facets of this trip, the optics were just awful.
In a strikingly spot-on sizing-up of his Russian counterparts, Sen. Johnson said, “when ruthless [and] strong people perceive weakness, they pounce.” Indeed, they started pouncing while Johnson’s delegation was still in Russia. When asked to confirm the supposed grilling on election interference, one Duma member characterized the meeting as “one of the easiest ones in my life.” Kosachev crowed that the mere fact of the visit was a concession, given the GOP leadership’s recent pledge to isolate Russia. To top it all off, Vladimir Putin spurned the delegation’s efforts to see him.
Russian state media also delighted in the senators’ new-found servility. While literally tramping upon a U.S. Senate seal emblazoned on the stage floor, one television commentator observed that “GOP lawmakers sounded tough on Russia when speaking from Washington, but changed their rhetoric upon arriving to Moscow.” In a particularly embarrassing moment, Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota) informed a television interviewer that the U.S. and Russia are merely competitors, not adversaries. Sound familiar? It did to the interviewer, who laughingly asked if Thune had rehearsed the line with Sen. Shelby. The program’s announcer, in a voiceover, promptly clarified that the two countries are, indeed, adversaries.
Aside from the yuks, the visitors provided their hosts with confirmation that President Trump has taken full control of the Republican Party, and that pro-Russian Trumpism is the future of American foreign policy. As long as the president keeps parroting Russia’s absurd denials of 2016 election interference, Republicans’ warnings about 2018 interference can be safely disregarded. Ominously, Trump himself began explicitly referring to Russia as a ‘competitor’ just before the summit.
Next year, Sen. Johnson should find a nice 4th of July parade to walk here at home. As a matter of fact, given this year’s debacle overseas, patriotic duty demands it.
Michael Cummins is a Madison-based business analyst.
