Editorial: Does Trump have what it takes to stand up to Putin?

When President Trump meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in Germany on Friday, it is entirely appropriate for him to explore possible areas of cooperation, including in minimizing conflict between the two countries in Syria and in defusing the crisis posed by North Korea’s nuclear program.

But that will not be enough. Trump must also confront Putin on Russia’s outrageous attempts to interfere with last year’s American elections and its continuing attempts to intimidate neighboring countries, including Ukraine and the Baltic states. The problem is that speaking those hard truths will take Trump out of his personal and political comfort zones.

The Trump-Putin meeting, which was originally expected to be a casual encounter at the Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg, has been upgraded to a more substantive conversation. No subject is more pertinent to such a discussion than Russian interference in the U.S. election. In January, a declassified report by U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian meddling, ordered by Putin, was “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations aimed at U.S. elections” and represented the “new normal” in efforts to influence U.S. politics.

As president, Trump should be offended by such interference even though he was the candidate favored by the Kremlin. Yet his reaction to revelations about Russian involvement has been a mixture of denial, disinformation and dismissiveness. The problem isn’t, as Hillary Clinton claimed in last year’s campaign, that Trump is Putin’s “puppet.” It’s that the president equates concern about Russian interference with a rejection of the legitimacy of his own election.

On Thursday, the president was still casting doubt on the conclusion of the intelligence community that Russia attempted to influence the election. At a news conference in Warsaw with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Trump said that although “I think it could very well have been Russia” that meddled in the election, “it could well have been other countries. … I think a lot of people interfere.”

This sort of willful blindness is bad enough when the president is speaking to American audiences or to reporters. But it becomes a dereliction of duty if it prevents him from confronting Putin about what the intelligence community and many in Congress see as a continuing threat to American democracy. Even worse would be any move by Trump to relax sanctions imposed by the Obama administration in response to Russian interference in the election. Those sanctions included the closing of two compounds used by Russian diplomats in New York and Maryland and that Washington said were used for espionage.

Trump also must confront Putin about Russia’s aggressive behavior toward its neighbors, including Ukraine where it has supported pro-separatists in a conflict that has cost 10,000 lives. On Thursday, Trump did say that Russia needed to “cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere.” When he meets Putin he must make clear that U.S. sanctions imposed in connection with Russian activities in Ukraine will remain in place until those activities cease.

Finally, Trump must communicate to Putin that the U.S. is dedicated to the security of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, recent additions to the NATO alliance that were once part of the Soviet Union. Leaders of those nations have been unsettled by a Russian missile deployment at Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea and provocative military maneuvers. Russia also has engaged in disinformation and “fake news” campaigns in the Baltic States, particularly in Russian-language media.

As recent members of NATO, the Baltic states have a special reason to be concerned about Trump’s commitment to the alliance, which he called “obsolete” during the campaign. In his speech in Warsaw on Thursday, Trump said that “we stand firmly behind Article 5,” the provision of the NATO treaty that says an armed attack against one member will be considered an attack against all. (The president raised eyebrows in May when he omitted an explicit endorsement of Article 5 from a speech he delivered at NATO headquarters in Brussels.) Trump needs to tell Putin that the U.S. makes no distinction in its commitment to Article 5 between old and new members of the alliance.

Trump prides himself on plain speaking and a disregard for “political correctness.” He should put those qualities to good use when he sits down with Vladimir Putin.

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