Rex Wrecks Relations
In his eight years in office, President Barack Obama demonstrated to Americans how a soft stance towards Mr. Putin would subject the United States to Russian demands. Back in August, Obama failed to stop Putin from intervening in the US elections. Putin’s vicious campaigns in Ukraine, as well as his fight in Syria convey his apathy towards American interests and his willingness to ignore our President.
It’s one thing for Trump to crave a reset in US-Russian relations, but it’s a whole different story for him to appoint a Secretary of State with many ties to Russian oil companies. As the CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson worked closely with corrupt Russian officials to secure deals for his company. In fact, this past February Tillerson bragged to students at the University of Texas about his “very close relationship with Vladimir.” In 2014, Tillerson opposed sanctions against Russian subjugation of Crimea, believing that they would hurt his profits in the country.
It’s one thing for Trump to crave a reset in US-Russian relations, but it’s a whole different story for him to appoint a Secretary of State with many ties to Russian oil companies.
The flamboyant friendship between Tillerson and Putin conceals the Russian president’s pragmatic and narcissistic approach towards the West. Tillerson received the Order of Friendship from Putin in 2013 not because of his efforts to strengthen relations between the two nations. Rather, he had succumbed to the preferences of Rosneft, Russia’s largest state-owned oil company, and cooperated with nefarious oligarchs and business magnates. Putin sees Tillerson as a puppet that he can manipulate and exploit.
Now is not the time for the United States to pursue warm and subservient relations with the world’s most assertive and virulent country. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton went on a disastrous honeymoon with former Russian president Boris Yeltsin. While the leaders supported each other in the fight against Milosevic in Serbia and the expulsion of nuclear weapon facilities from former Soviet satellite states, the issues of NATO enlargement and Russian aggression in Chechnya aggravated their relationship. Bill and Boris shied away from direct confrontation and instead flattered each other at their unproductive meetings. During a conference in Washington, Bill broke out laughing (and crying) as drunken Boris attempted to make a speech in front of a confused audience. The Russian government receded—to the naïve surprise of most Western politicians and the ignorant amusement of former President Bill Clinton—into its quintessential authoritarian state.
The relationship exploded in 1999 when Yeltsin exclaimed that American-led “aggression against Yugoslavia deprived Clinton of the right to lecture Russia on how it should deal with terrorists within its own borders.” Stunned and annoyed, Clinton placed his feet on the table and then left the room. The two clowns were no longer on speaking terms.
What did Bill accomplish through his phony friendship with Boris? Ignoring Yeltsin’s meager poll numbers and his increasingly alcoholic tendencies, Bill bolstered his Russian friend during his 1995 re-election campaign, funneling billions of dollars into the Russian federation to quickly boost the economy. He turned a blind eye and fostered corruption in Russia, allowing the voucher privatization and loans-for-shares schemes to flourish.
No Western leader—including Mr. Tillerson and President-elect Trump—should condone Putin’s impetuous choices in the same way that Bill excused Yeltsin’s ignorance. Russia recently admitted to instigating a doping program during the Sochi Winter Olympics, many months after the Olympic Committee indicted the Russians for their misconduct. Statistics from the World Bank show that the Russian poverty rate has been on the rise since 2012; their gross domestic product has fallen close to a trillion dollars in the past two years, reflecting the unsustainability of Russia’s oil-dependent economy. Trump cannot pretend that the United States and Russia are equals in this relationship.