Russia looms...

Russia looms over Trump's meetings with European leaders

Trump’s talk of befriending Putin doesn’t just rattle the 28-member NATO military alliance. It also unnerves senior European Union officials.

By MICHAEL CROWLEY and TARA PALMERI

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited President Donald Trump at the White House in March, she brought a visual aid to help Trump understand the menace posed by his would-be friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Merkel brought out a 1980s map of the former Soviet Union and noted the way its borders stretched for hundreds of miles to the west of Russia’s current boundary, according to a source who was briefed on the meeting. The German leader explained that Putin laments the Soviet Union’s demise and, left unchecked, would happily restore its former borders. Merkel left Washington unconvinced that Trump had gotten the message, the source said. (A spokesman for the German embassy in Washington declined to comment on a private meeting. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

After stops in the Middle East and at the Vatican allowed Trump to escape some questions about Russian influence over his campaign and White House, the U.S. leader will meet in Brussels Thursday with NATO and European Union officials who remain deeply uneasy about his intentions towards Putin weeks before an expected July meeting between the two men.

“People are confused and suspicious,” said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who served as NATO’s secretary general until 2014. “What is needed is a clearly formulated American policy on Russia. The reason why people are preoccupied by all the investigations [in Washington] is that there is no clear Russia policy.”

European officials are straining to make sense of an administration in which some top officials talk tough about Putin, while Trump banters in the Oval Office with senior Russian diplomats and releases statements stressing the prospect of cooperation with Moscow. Russia won't likely be a top agenda item when Trump visits, but it will loom over his meetings, nonetheless.

Trump’s talk of befriending Putin doesn’t just rattle the 28-member NATO military alliance, which has spent the past few years bolstering its eastern frontier. It also unnerves senior officials of the European Union, whose leaders believe Putin is assisting their enemies, including anti-EU populist candidates across Europe whom the Kremlin is believed to be aiding financially and through espionage and hacking.

“Russia is of course the elephant in the room” in any discussion with Trump, a senior EU official told POLITICO.

Eager to please the new president on his first visit, NATO and EU officials are not expected to grill him on his intentions toward Putin. The EU official said Russia is not on the agenda for Trump’s meeting with EU President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, which will focus more on climate change and trade. A source familiar with planning for Trump’s visit to NATO headquarters said officials there will not make Moscow a primary focus of their meeting, which they have abbreviated to suit Trump’s short attention span.

Instead, they will aim to convince Trump that the 28-member alliance is responding to his repeated criticisms. That means showing progress among NATO members towards a shared commitment of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense; only a handful currently do so. NATO leaders will also remind Trump that an alliance he has said should be more focused on terrorism has joined the U.S. fight in Afghanistan since 2001.

At the same time, NATO officials hope to hear Trump acknowledge that their organization’s core mission is not about terrorists but Russia. NATO was founded in 1949 to ensure the collective defense of Western Europe against the Soviet Union; it has since added many Eastern European member states —several of them former Soviet republics — who fear Putin’s revanchism.

As a candidate, Trump declared NATO to be “obsolete,” but said in mid-April that was no longer the case. While grateful for the reversal, NATO officials remain unnerved by Trump’s rationale—namely that the alliance had “made a change and now they do fight terrorism.” (Trump never specified what change he was referring to, though last fall NATO created a new counterterrorism intelligence division. Officials there did not consider that a major shift in mission, however.)

NATO officials were encouraged by reports ahead of Trump’s arrival that he would reaffirm American support for Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which commits every member state to assist the defense of any other member facing outside aggression. As a candidate, Trump suggested that he might not defend a member state that was not paying its share to support the alliance.

“Of course we support Article 5,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters Wednesday, adding that the only time the provision had been invoked was after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The EU is far less oriented towards Russia than NATO. But the union does maintain economic sanctions on Russia over its aggression in Ukraine, and its officials say they will keep them in place until Moscow complies with a peace accord it signed in Minsk two years ago.

“With regard to Ukraine, I think they would very much like him to stand up for the right of states to defend their borders and protect their sovereignty,” Evelyn Farkas, the Pentagon’s top Russia official under President Barack Obama, said of Trump. “But I don't know if they will expect that.”

Amid the anxiety, some sources said there is less concern about Trump in Europe today than there was soon after the election. Top Trump officials have reassured EU and NATO leaders that the U.S. does not intend dramatic changes to its decades-long commitment to European security and integration.

EU leaders also have been heartened by the diminished role of White House adviser Steven Bannon, a known EU skeptic, and appreciated a warm visit from Vice President Mike Pence in February.

“A lot of doubts about this administration have been dispelled,” said a senior EU official.

And while NATO officials want more clarity from Trump, they understand that the current political dynamic in Washington likely prevents him from rushing into Putin’s arms.

“One of the concerns the alliance had was that someone would leave Washington, fly over their heads in Brussels, land in Moscow and crack a deal that affected NATO's interests. And NATO would be consulted only afterwards,” said Douglas Lute, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO until January. (Trump has yet to nominate a successor for the job.)

Thanks to Russian meddling in the U.S. election and the ongoing investigations in DC, “those concerns are mostly gone,” Lute said.

Even so, European officials can’t predict what might happen when Trump and Putin sit down together.

That is expected to happen for the first time at a G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany in early July.