In a blistering speech last week before the U.N. Security Council, Ambassador Nikki Haley told her fellow diplomats that this time, she would not repeat the presentation she had given after a previous chemical-weapons attack launched by the Syrian government, with the backing of Russia. This time, she would not show the world the gruesome pictures of dead children, their bodies blue from a lack of oxygen.
She would not do because "the Russian regime, whose hands are also covered in the blood of Syrian children, cannot be shamed by pictures of its victims."
"Russia could stop this senseless slaughter, if it wanted,” she asserted. “But it stands with the Assad regime and supports it without hesitation. What's the point of trying to shame such people? After all, no civilized government would have anything to do with Assad's murderous regime."
Despite that condemnation, the Russian government continues to protect its Syrian client state. It has vetoed a U.N. resolution condemning the attacks. It has blocked chemical-weapons investigators from visiting the site of the attacks, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has accused Russian personnel of tampering with the crime scene. Russia has also made it clear that any meaningful military reaction against Syria by the United States would raise the threat of Russian retaliation, which is why the recent U.S. missile strikes were so limited as to be almost meaningless.
So in an appearance on CBS on Sunday, Haley announced that in addition to the missile strikes, the Trump administration was imposing another round of punitive sanctions on Russia, carefully tailored for the situation. “They will go directly to any sort of companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and chemical weapons used,” Haley said. “And so I think everyone is going to feel it at this point. I think everyone knows that we sent a strong message, and our hope is that they listen to it.”
Unfortunately, that lesson didn’t stick. A few hours later, at the orders of President Trump himself, the additional sanctions were canceled out of fear that they would anger Vladimir Putin and further degrade U.S.-Russia relations.
As Trump’s defenders point out, better relations with Russia would be a good thing. The problem is that since 2014, Russia has invaded and annexed Crimea. It has sent troops and offensive military equipment into its neighbor Ukraine, where that equipment was used to down a civilian airliner. It has interfered directly and with impunity in our elections and those of our allies. It has launched a nerve agent attack on a Russian exile in Great Britain. And in Syria, it continues to champion and protect a regime that dares to deploy banned chemical weapons against its own innocent civilians, knowing that with Russian protection the backlash will be minimal.
That is not the behavior of a nation or a leader interested in better relations. That is the behavior of someone testing the boundaries and finding little pushback. And in President Trump --- by position the leader of the free world, by nature aggressive to the point of bullying -- Putin has found a person who is bizarrely unwilling to confront him, who takes actions only when compelled to do so by domestic politics and even then makes clear his reluctance.
And as we all know, there’s a history between the two men, a history that is now the subject of a special counsel investigation into possible collusion. To cite just one example of that history, in late 2015, months after Trump launched his campaign for president, Trump attorney Michael Cohen was deeply embroiled in then-secret negotiations to build a major new Trump hotel in Moscow.
In the midst of those negotiations, as part of his matchmaking efforts between the the two men, Cohen took time to tweet the following:
Which a few months later was followed by:
Like I said, bizarre.
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