19 July 2018
Heard In Helsinki
What did Trump say?
By Neil Tidmarsh
There they are, the two luckiest men in the world, sitting together, watching the Russia 2018 final.
President Macron – le veinard! – the last man standing in every contest he enters. He steps up for the leadership of France – and the opposition promptly collapses; the Socialists implode post-Hollande and the Republicans sink without trace when Fillon finds himself facing criminal charges. Macron then steps up for the leadership of Europe – and all competition melts away; the British prime minister has her hands full with Brexit and the suddenly-embattled German chancellor has her hands full forming a government and keeping it together.
But is his luck about to run out? His team – an exceptional team, easily the best in the whole tournament – is nevertheless looking distinctly ordinary against their Croatian opponents, who have all the possession, all the skill, all the shots in the first half. Could les bleus be about to lose? It certainly looks like it. But no, Macron’s luck holds. The referee gives two dodgy penalties against Croatia (decisions which leave the BBC pundits gasping with disbelief and outrage at half time), gifting France the two goal lead which will eventually secure them victory and the World Cup, final score 4-2. Vraiment, il a de la veine, le President!
Beside him, President Putin probably can’t believe his luck, either. He’s just pulled off the biggest and best “Bread and Circuses” coup of all time. (Well, the ‘circuses’ bit, anyway – the ‘bread’ bit went down the drain when those hikes in the retirement age were announced – but at least the announcement was made as the football was kicking off, so the cries of “But you promised not to!” were rather drowned out by the cheers of the fans and the applause of the pundits). He built it, but would they come? They would, they did – the best players on the planet and the whole world to watch them too. But would everybody behave themselves? Yes, they would and they did. Even Pussy Riot got short shrift on the pitch and in the media. What luck!
But that’s not all. Only a few days after the World Cup final, he has a meeting with President Trump.
It’s easy to imagine the questions which have been preoccupying President Putin and his intelligence services in recent months:
What information do the British authorities have about Russian state involvement in the Salisbury novichok attacks? Where did that information come from, and how did they get it? How far would US troops be prepared to go in support of their Kurdish allies in Syria? Would they be prepared to openly engage with Regime troops on the Syrian battlefield? With Iranian troops? With Russian troops? Even with the troops of their Nato ally Turkey? How keen is the White House to pull its troops out of Syria altogether, and what could persuade it to do so? How keen is the White House to pull its troops out of Eastern Europe, and what could persuade it to do so? How far is the USA prepared to go to counter China’s growing military influence around the globe, and how ready and able is it to do so? How could Washington be persuaded to recognise the Russian annexation of the Crimea? How could Washington be persuaded to drop sanctions aimed at punishing Russia for conflict in Ukraine?
And as luck would have it, the one man who knows the answers to these questions has agreed to meet with Putin, for ninety minutes of private conversation, without aides, ministers or advisors, alone but for an interpreter. No wonder Putin was smiling, in spite of the rain, as the World Cup was finally presented. As if all that World Cup glory to bask in and look back upon wasn’t enough, here comes the promise of mighty revelations in Helsinki to look forward to. Those were the smiles of a confident man, as sure of as big a success in Finland as he’d managed at home with the World Cup. But the answers to those questions could well be highly confidential, of course. Carefully guarded secrets. Did Putin really think he could get secrets out of Trump?
Look at it this way. Putin is – or was – a KGB man, trained and expert in the arts and sciences of interrogation, persuasion, suggestion. And his passion is judo – the martial art which teaches its devotees to harness the weight and strength of their opponents and use it against them.
And Trump – he has an almost pathological, almost Asperger’s urge to blurt out the inconvenient truth, no matter how unpolitic, undiplomatic, discourteous or just plain stupid it might be (yes, Mrs May’s Brexit white paper may well mean that the UK would not be free to make a trade deal with the USA; the EU really is an anti-American fortress built by Europe against the economic might and cultural influence of the USA; China doesn’t play fair in international trade; the USA’s Nato allies are shirking their responsibilities; the Iran nuclear deal is too generous to Tehran: but is it really in the USA’s interests to shout all this from the rooftops?). And he has a dangerous over-abundance of self-confidence. And he has a dangerous admiration for strong and powerful leaders. (The most interesting thing in that extraordinary press conference in Helsinki was his description of Putin’s denial of interference; Trump didn’t use the adjectives one might expect – ‘sincere’, perhaps, or ‘heartfelt’ or ‘credible’ – he used the words ‘strong’ and ‘powerful’.) And he does have form in spilling confidential information to the other side (remember that meeting with Lavrov, where he disclosed secret information entrusted to the USA by Israel and the UK?).
Putin might have dug out his old KGB manual “Advanced Interrogation Techniques For High-Level Operatives” prior to Helsinki and done a bit of boning-up, but he probably didn’t think it necessary to slip veritas serum into Trump’s orange juice.
We know what Trump said in the Press Conference which followed their meeting, of course, and that was worrying enough (“wouldn’t” – “would” – is anybody fooled?); but even more worrying is what he might have said during that meeting (which alarmingly stretched from ninety minutes to over two hours). Even more worrying still is the fact that we don’t know and may never know what he said, what he might have divulged.
Perhaps he divulged nothing at all.
But it’s interesting to contrast Putin’s attitude before they went into their meeting to his attitude when they came out of it. In the pre-meeting press conference he was slouching and sullen (his mind perhaps still running over the previous night’s revision of “Advanced Interrogation Techniques”). But when he came out of that meeting he was a happy man, beaming cheerful smiles at all and sundry during that second press-conference. What might that tell us?
