Trump’s duty to call out Putin for crimes

Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott, with the support of Bill Shorten, are absolutely right to contradict Donald Trump and take a much more critical line towards Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s terrorists shot down MH17 and killed 38 Australians. If an Australian government doesn’t care about that, it would be beneath contempt.

However, Trump’s meeting with Putin is a complete mixed grill, nowhere near as bad as former CIA director John Brennan’s ludicrous claim of Trump being “treasonous”, but pretty strange nonetheless.

The criticism of Trump that he won’t call out the Russian President for meddling in the US election of 2016 is overblown. Trump can’t embrace this line or he risks, in his own mind at least, calling into question the legitimacy of his own presidency. It also risks giving a sense of credibility to the charge, for which so far there is no compelling evidence, that his campaign in some serious way colluded with the Russians.

At the same time, the decision by the Mueller investigation to charge 12 Russian intelligence agents with such interference, on the eve of the Trump/Putin summit, seems again politicised in its timing and something near to interference in areas beyond the investigation’s scope.

As bad as Trump often is, his enemies always help him out.

No one has any doubt that the Russians did interfere in the US election. There is absolutely zero evidence it had any effect. But it is also about the least of Putin’s depredations and crimes. Constantly harping on about 2016 is a way for Trump’s enemies to ensure that he never gives them an all around good Russia policy.

It is overall a good thing that the leaders of the two biggest nuclear powers in the world should meet. What is entirely unsatisfactory is Trump’s complete refusal to criticise Putin over his big crimes against humanity — the invasion of ­Crimea, the downing of MH17, the targeted assassinations, the ruthless human rights crackdowns at home, the disregard for the laws of war in Syria, the strategic assistance to Iran.

These issues are a million times more important than internet bots in 2016 and it is Trump’s brazen refusal even to acknowledge them, much less try to deal with them, for which he deserves the greatest criticism in his meeting with Putin.

Yet, as ever with Trump, there are still more complicating factors.

Despite Trump’s consistently and weirdly nice words for Putin, he has actually applied much tougher sanctions on Russia than Barack Obama did, and sold Ukraine more lethal weaponry.

As ever, there is a simply unbridgeable gap between what Trump frequently says and what he does. Nonetheless, there is a real damage in the president consistently making statements which are morally and factually wrong.

There is a real cost to undermining the word of the president.

In A Passage to India, EM Forster asked whether India was a mystery or a muddle. In Trump’s case, he is certainly both.

For you also have to see the Putin summit in the context of the whole Trump week in Europe. As one British wit observed, Trump has a new technique — tell a big truth as disagreeably as possible then tell a nice lie to make it less harsh.

So he thundered at European NATO members, rightly, for failing to spend seriously on defence. Then next day, quite dishonestly, he said they had now promised to do so and everything was good.

In Britain he thundered, truthfully but very unhelpfully for his ally Theresa May, that her Brexit plan made a free-trade deal with the US impossible. Next day, untruthfully but diplomatically, he contradicted himself and said a trade deal would be no problem.

His purposes with Putin are probably more about domestic politics. He certainly skipped with Putin the stage of telling him a big unpleasant truth. But Trump’s base likes seeing Trump cavorting with big world figures, they even apparently like to see him lashing out at democrats and cosying up to dictators.

There is on the American nutty Right, and inevitably they have a faint echo in Australia, a small group who have a truly grotesque devotion to Putin as a champion of Western civilisation.

These folks, who prove the nutty Right is just as fantastic and creepy as the nutty Left, are all devoted Trumpsters.

Trump wants these folks loyally in his camp. He certainly seems to have achieved that.