Trump the Useful Idiot

NEW YORK – What goes around comes around. You reap what you sow. Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.

Such adages simultaneously admonish and comfort: bad actors, whether you or those who wrong you, will eventually get their karmic comeuppance. In reality, however, bad actors often escape accountability for their behavior, sometimes owing to luck, and sometimes as the outcome of a successful tactic to advance a strategic goal.

Russia falls into the latter category. President Vladimir Putin’s strategy for getting away with inflicting large-scale devastation on Ukraine and engaging in situational hybrid warfare across the West includes two Soviet-era tactics: enlisting “useful idiots” in the cause and employing “salami tactics” to achieve your ends.

The first tactic, often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, refers to the exploitation of unwitting allies – those who inadvertently advance the bad actor’s cause, possibly even while loudly opposing it. For Putin today, no idiot is more useful than US President Donald Trump.

Putin identified Trump’s potential to fill this role before the 2016 presidential election, which he sought to tilt in Trump’s favor. The two leaders’ 2018 summit in Helsinki – when Trump publicly contradicted US intelligence agencies by asserting that Russia had not made any effort to influence the election – almost certainly confirmed Putin’s assessment. Since then, Trump has shown an almost pathological desire to tout his “fantastic” relationship with Putin, even as Putin has discounted, disregarded, and defied him.

After their recent summit in Alaska led nowhere, with Putin rejecting Trump’s demand for a cease-fire in Ukraine, Trump started echoing the Kremlin’s call for an immediate peace deal. He later proudly showed reporters a photo of the two leaders, which Putin had sent him. When multiple Russian drones crossed into Poland’s airspace last week, Trump, always willing to excuse Putin, said it “could have been a mistake.” One cannot help but think of a desperate child insisting that his bully is his friend.

To no one’s surprise, Trump has fallen for Putin’s “salami tactics,” whereby a big goal, which would most likely be met with powerful resistance, is advanced through a sequence of smaller maneuvers, or “slices,” each of which potential opponents are likely to dismiss, downplay, or grudgingly accept. The recent drone incursions into Poland and Romania are a case in point: the goal was not to provoke war with NATO, but rather to test the Alliance’s capabilities and, perhaps more crucially, its resolve.

And how did Putin’s useful idiot in the White House respond to these provocations? He confirmed, yet again, that the United States is loath to lift a finger to defend its NATO allies.

Of course, Putin began using salami tactics well before Trump arrived on the political scene. Russia’s gradual takeover of Ukrainian territory, which began with the 2014 annexation of Crimea, also reflects this approach. Rather than pushing back, Trump attempts to present the Kremlin’s actions as proof of his own strength: if it weren’t for me, he claims, Putin would have taken the entire country.

Putin’s hero, Joseph Stalin, used a similar approach to eliminate potential domestic rivals, such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Bukharin. To be sure, slicing a salami was too small-shopkeeper of a metaphor for a man who designed grandiose plans for the state-wide planned economy. But Mátyás Rákosi, the hardline leader of the postwar Hungarian Communist Party and a loyal disciple of Stalin (until the Hungarian Stalinists turned on him because he was Jewish), had no such qualms about using the term.

Salami tactics are not limited to the Kremlin. Prior to World War II, Germany began its quest for European domination with a series of small non-military and quasi-military steps, intended to be limited enough that European powers would not mount a military response. Today, Chinese President Xi Jinping uses salami tactics – including the quiet construction of military outposts in disputed areas – to shift the territorial status quo in the South China Sea and the Himalayas, without triggering any serious international pushback.

With Xi having effectively emulated Mao Zedong at a recent military parade in Beijing, one wonders whether the success of his strategy is emboldening him to adopt a more confrontational posture. Like Putin – who was in attendance – Xi is probably not too worried about Trump even attempting to mount an effective response. Trump is too credulous, too easy to manipulate, not least because of his apparent longing to be part of their authoritarian club. Watching that Tiananmen Square parade, Trump probably yearned to be sitting beside kindred spirits, leaders who rule by fear, value personal loyalty above all else, and hold democratic institutions and the rule of law in contempt.

Maybe karma will come one day for Putin or Xi. But Trump the useful idiot is unlikely to be its agent.

• Nina L. Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School, is the co-author (with Jeffrey Tayler), most recently, of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin’s Press, 2019).