Scary summit II: Who needs what from whom? And why?

What does the United States need from Vladimir Putin?

What does Donald Trump need from Vladimir Putin?

Are they the same thing?

And what does Putin need from the U.S. and Donald Trump?

You needn’t be a self-proclaimed master dealmaker to understand that you don’t enter negotiations without a chance of fulfilling some need.

The first and last questions are the easiest to answer:

In the broadest sense, the U.S. needs nothing from Putin except that he remain convinced that nuclear war means instant, mutual destruction. We don’t need Putin’s aid or acquiescence to do that.

Putin, however, needs something that only the U.S. can provide: help, or at least acquiescence, in rebuilding the 1950s Soviet Union’s superpower status, which requires regaining controlled access to deep, warm-water ports.

The 1991 collapse of the USSR into 15 independent states left the Russian core with only one slow, tenuous warm water outlet, through the Black Sea and Turkey’s Bosporus Strait to the Mediterranean; the suddenly independent and democracy-prone Baltic and Balkan states control the others.

That’s a problem for Putin’s dream because the Baltic and Balkan states have been joining NATO — the latest being Montenegro, a tiny country but the site of a large Adriatic seaport of the sort he covets.

To achieve his goal, Putin needs the U.S. or NATO or both to look the other way while he re-annexes a few of those seaside countries.

Given those circumstances, it’s not hard to understand why Putin was pleased to get his mark, the self-acclaimed world’s greatest negotiator and avowed skeptic of NATO, into the presidency and across the table.

It’s working. Last week they met in Helsinki and the people around Trump foolishly allowed him to sit with Putin for an unprecedented one-on-one, two-hour-plus discussion with only interpreters present.

The private nature of the setting was a bonus for Putin, the value of which the Russians know and Americans still do not. Nor can Americans expect a truthful report from a man who lies to them several times a day.

After the talks, which Russia later claimed resulted in several important if informal agreements, there was a joint news conference that could only be rated as humiliating for the U.S, its allies, and Trump’s legacy. Those cringe-inducing moments of kowtowing to a dictator resulted, back home a day later, in Trump sounding like a junior high truant being forced by the principal to publicly acknowledge his misbehavior.

Yet a day after that, Trump was insisting that the fumbled summit was so successful that he must follow it up in the fall, in Washington.

Why?

Trump has already given Putin help in rebuilding the USSR. Every time he suggests, as he has dozens of times, that the U.S. might not fulfill its NATO obligation to defend every member against outside aggression, Putin smiles.

And when Trump, post-summit, went out of his way to call the people of Montenegro “very aggressive” and warned, “They may get aggressive and, congratulations, you’re in World War III,” Putin surely sensed an opening, if not an invitation, to fabricate an incident, as he did in seizing Crimea in 2014, an important USSR rebuilding block.

But what does Trump need from Putin? Does it involve a national interest that we don’t understand or know about? Or is it more personal?

It was naïve and irresponsible for Trump’s people to allow Putin the advantage of one-on-one, secret discussion with an amateur; it would be madness to do so again.

This story was originally published July 24, 2018 at 7:27 AM.