THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALSATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 2020 Y A
WASHINGTON — On the eve
of accepting the Republican
nomination for president four
years ago, Donald J. Trump
declared that he would pull out of
NATO if American allies did not
pay more for their defense, wav-
ing away the thought that it
would play into the hands of
President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia, who has spent his career
trying to dismantle the Western
alliance.
Asked about his deference to
the Kremlin leader, Mr. Trump
responded, “He’s been compli-
mentary of me.”
This week, as his renomination
nears, Mr. Trump announced
that he was pulling a third of
American troops from Germany.
He declared in recent days that
he had never raised with Mr.
Putin, during a recent phone
conversation, American intelli-
gence indicating that Russia was
paying a bounty to the Taliban
for the killing of American sol-
diers in Afghanistan, because he
distrusted the information. Nor
has he issued warnings about
what price, if any, Mr. Putin
would pay for seeking to influ-
ence the 2020 election or pushing
disinformation about the coro-
navirus. U.S. intelligence agen-
cies say Russia is trying both.
Say this about Mr. Trump’s
approach to Moscow: It has been
consistent.
With three months until Elec-
tion Day, he is repeating a vari-
ant of lines from his first cam-
paign. It would be “wonderful” if
“instead of fighting each other,
we got along.” That he and Mr.
Putin are working together to
reduce the threat of nuclear war,
even though both nations have
spent the past four years devel-
oping nuclear weapons and
scuttling treaties that limited
their stockpiles. In recent days,
he has begun deflecting ques-
tions about Russia’s cyberactivi-
ties by repeating another line
from 2016: that everyone turns a
blind eye to China.
What is striking about all these
comments is that they indicate
little or no evolution in Mr.
Trump’s approach.
John F. Kennedy used the
Cuban missile crisis to start the
era of arms control negotiations
with the Soviets, and Ronald
Reagan transitioned from the
hard-line anti-Communism of his
party to doing business with a
reformist Kremlin leader, Mikhail
S. Gorbachev. But Mr. Trump has
never wavered from a policy of
praise and nonconfrontation.
Just as he rarely misses a cam-
paign-season opportunity to take
on Beijing, he has not wavered
from accommodating Moscow.
The absence of a strategy to
alter Moscow's behavior at this
electoral inflection point — four
years ago this week, the C.I.A.
was coming to the conclusion
that Russia was responsible for
the hacking of the Democratic
National Committee’s servers —
has been particularly evident in
recent days. After trying to raise
doubts that Russia was behind
the breach, the release of emails
and a social media influence
campaign, Mr. Trump has settled
on a strategy of silence about
evidence of an emerging new
Russian playbook.
So when he spoke with Mr.
Putin recently, the White House
gave no indication the warnings
from intelligence agencies and
the Department of Homeland
Security even came up.
“At this very moment, Putin is
presumably deciding how far to
go in interfering in the 2020
election,” said David Shimer, a
historian and the author of
“Rigged: America, Russia, and
One Hundred Years of Covert
Electoral Interference,” a study
of Russian and American efforts
to influence elections around the
globe. “Leaders like Putin pushas far as they can without pro-
voking meaningful pushback,
and in that sense, Trump’s con-
tinued passivity toward Russia
could embolden Putin to proceed
more aggressively.”
Not surprisingly, the adminis-
tration rejects the notion that it
has given Mr. Putin free rein. Mr.
Trump regularly says no U.S.
president has been tougher on
Russia, “maybe tougher than any
other president.”
The president’s advisers point
out that Mr. Trump’s own Justice
Department indicted 12 Russian
intelligence officers for breaking
into the Democratic National
Committee and running the
social media campaign — though
Mr. Trump has questioned Rus-
sia’s ability for both. Under au-
thorities given to it by the presi-
dent, the director of the National
Security Agency and commander
of United States Cyber Com-
mand, General Paul A. Naka-
sone, briefly paralyzed the Inter-
net Research Agency, a troll farm
in St. Petersburg, Russia, during
the 2018 midterm elections to
send a message. (Mr. Trump
later said he was responsible for
the action.)
And Mr. Trump’s secretary of
state, Mike Pompeo, declared the
United States would never recog-
nize Russia’s annexation of
Crimea — “Crimea is Ukraine,”
he said on the sixth anniversary
of the unilateral seizure of the
territory, not mentioning that Mr.
Trump said in an interview with
The New York Times in 2016 thathe did not understand why the
United States was penalizing
Russia for events that primarily
affected allies far away.
But it is the withdrawal of
troops from Germany, and the
absence of any response to the
intelligence on the bounties
offered to the Taliban for killing
Americans, that seems to encap-
sulate the administration’s ab-
sence of a strategy.
Mr. Pompeo struggled to de-
fend either in Senate testimony
Thursday. He noted that as a
newly minted Army officer dur-
ing the final days of the Cold War,
he himself “fought on the border
of East Germany,” leading Sena-
tor Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of
New Hampshire, to note wryly
that under Mr. Trump’s orders
“your unit is coming back to the
United States.”
But Mr. Pompeo’s testimony
was more notable for what he
failed to say. He provided no
strategic rationale for the reduc-
tion of 12,000 troops in Germany,
including 6,400 returning to the
United States. He made the case
that they could return to Europe
quickly, but never addressed the
fundamental issue: that the
decision was part of presidential
pique that Chancellor Angela
Merkel of Germany was not
devoting a big enough portion of
the national budget to her na-
tion’s defense — and that reduc-
ing the American military pres-
ence in German fulfilled one of
Mr. Putin’s greatest dreams.
“Germany is supposed to payfor it,” Mr. Trump said of the
American presence, as if the
forward deployment was not a
central part of the United States’
own defense strategy for the past
75 years. “Germany’s not paying
for it. We don’t want to be the
suckers anymore. The United
States has been taken advantage
of for 25 years, both on trade and
on the military. So we’re reducing
the force because they’re not
paying their bills.”
For four years, Mr. Trump has
talked about “NATO fees.” There
are no such fees. Six years ago,
members agreed to spend 2
percent of their gross domestic
product on their defense by 2024.
Germany spends 1.5 percent;
Italy and Belgium, where the
United States says it is moving
some of its forces, spend less.
Mr. Pompeo further muddied
the waters on intelligence sur-
rounding the bounties for U.S.
lives. Citing intelligence con-
cerns, he would not discuss the
C.I.A. analysis included in a
Presidential Daily Brief in Febru-
ary that Mr. Trump says never
reached his desk.
What is still missing is any
statement of what the adminis-
tration is trying to accomplish
with Russia. Containment of a
declining but still disruptive
nuclear power? An end to use of
its cyberpower to step into the
middle of the U.S. elections?
Mr. Trump has had four years,
and he hasn’t said.
“There appears to be no over-
arching objective, no strategy for
getting there, no coherent policy
process,” Wendy R. Sherman,
who served in the State Depart-
ment during the Obama and
Clinton administrations, wrote
Friday in Foreign Policy. “There
is no evidence, for example, of a
desire to preserve arms control
with Russia or to stop Russia’s
(or any other country’s) persist-
ent disinformation campaigns
that are now looming as an ever-
larger threat to the integrity of
the U.S. election.”NEWS ANALYSISTrump Still Defers to Putin
As He Dismisses Intelligence
By DAVID E. SANGERIn four years, President Trump
hasn’t said what he is is trying
to accomplish with Russia and
President Vladimir V. Putin.ERIN SCHAFF FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESLONDON — Queen Elizabeth II
threw him an extravagant state
banquet at Buckingham Palace.
Former Prime Minister Theresa
May welcomed him to Blenheim
Palace, the family seat of his hero,
Winston Churchill. Her successor,
Boris Johnson, refused to join a
global chorus of criticism after he
ordered troops to break up a Black
Lives Matter protest outside the
White House.
Few countries have worked
harder than Britain to please
President Trump. But now, with
Mr. Trump trailing in the polls to
former Vice President Joseph R.
Biden Jr., British officials are wak-
ing up to an unsettling prospect:
The president they tried so hard to
accommodate may be out of
power next year.
In Paris and Berlin, a Trump de-
feat would be welcomed as an un-
alloyed relief, removing a leader
who has sundered alliances,
threatened a trade war and tried
to dismantle the European
project. But in London, where Mr.
Johnson’s government just left the
European Union, it is more com-
plicated.
At a moment of British isola-
tion, Mr. Trump’s full-throated en-
dorsement of Brexit has made the
United States a safe harbor. His
promise of a lucrative trade deal
gave Mr. Johnson a selling point
with his voters. His populist poli-
tics were in sync with the bare-
knuckle tactics of the Brexiteers.
If Mr. Biden wins in November,
Britain would face a president
who opposed Brexit, would look
out for the interests of Ireland in a
post-Brexit Europe, and would
have little motive to prioritize an
Anglo-American trade deal. His
former boss, President Barack
Obama, once warned Britons that
if they left the European Union,
they would put themselves at the
“back of the queue” in any trade
talks with the United States.
“It will not be lost on Biden that
the last two British prime min-
isters went out of their way to be
nice to and about Trump,” said Pe-
ter Westmacott, a former British
ambassador to the United States.
“He is instinctively comfortable
with Brits, but London will have to
work on the relationship.”
As Mr. Trump’s polling numbers
have eroded, pro-government pa-
pers have begun to make the case
that a President Biden would ac-
tually be better for Britain than
President Trump. Unlike Mr.
Trump, he is a believer in alli-
ances. He would not subject Mr.
Johnson to rude lectures about the
need for Britain to take a harder
line against China. He would not
be toxic with much of the British
public.
In a recent column in The Sun-
day Times, a well-connected polit-
ical journalist, Tim Shipman,
quoted an unnamed government
minister saying that a Trump de-
feat ‘‘would make things much
easier.’’
That sounds like a government
hedging its bets. Mr. Johnson has
been careful to say nothing about
the American election but he has
already tried to keep Mr. Trump at
arm’s length even as he avoids of-
fending him. Mr. Trump, by con-
trast, called into a London radio
show in the heat of the British
election to praise Mr. Johnson and
run down his opponent.
Britain’s uneasiness is com-
pounded by the strangeness of
this election. The Biden campaign
has all but banned contact with
foreign governments to avoid the
questions that dogged the Trump
campaign in 2016 about its ties to
Russia. The pandemic has de-
prived Britain of its long practice
of embedding a diplomat in the
challenger’s campaign because
there is little in-person campaign-
ing.
Jonathan Powell, who as a
young British diplomat rode on
the bus during Bill Clinton’s 1992
campaign, said the connections he
made were valuable in smoothing
over bitterness Mr. Clinton’s aides
felt toward Britain’s Conservative
government after it tried to dig up
incriminating details about Mr.
Clinton’s years at Oxford to help
George H.W. Bush’s campaign.
Mr. Powell later introduced Mr.
Clinton to Tony Blair, who went on
to become prime minister and a
friendlier counterpart.
Riding the bus is less important
this time, he said, given that Mr.
Biden is already so well-known to
British officials. But the lack of a
personal connection may foretell
a relationship that is destined to
become more distant.
The risk for Britain, several ex-
perts said, is not a sudden rupture
but a gradual slide into irrele-vance. Mr. Biden’s emphasis, they
said, would be on mending fences
with Berlin and Paris, not cele-
brating a “special relationship”
with London that got plenty of at-
tention from his predecessor.
On a visit to London in October
2018, Mr. Biden, not yet a candi-
date, cast his opposition to Brexit
in geopolitical terms, saying it
would make Britain less valuable
to the United States as a lever to
influence the European Union.
“Had I been a member of Parlia-
ment, had I been a British citizen,
I would have voted against leav-ing,” Mr. Biden said at Chatham
House, the London research insti-
tution. “U.S. interests,” he added,
“are diminished with Great Brit-
ain not an integral part of Europe.”
Charles A. Kupchan, a profes-
sor at Georgetown University
who worked on European affairs
in the Obama White House and is
advising Mr. Biden’s campaign,
said, “The question is not, ‘Will
there be a special relationship?’
There will be. The question is,
‘Will the special relationship mat-
ter?’ ”
British officials recognize the
challenge. They cite human rights
and Russia as areas where Britain
could carve out a robust rolealongside the United States. Mr.
Johnson’s recent reversal barring
the Chinese telecommunications
giant Huawei from access to its 5G
network brings Britain in line with
a more hawkish American policy
toward China. That is likely to ex-
tend beyond Mr. Trump’s presi-
dency.
He may need to patch up other
lingering issues. In 2016, when Mr.
Johnson was mayor of London, he
recounted in a newspaper column
that Mr. Obama replaced a bust of
Churchill in the Oval Office with
one of Martin Luther King Jr., and
attributed the switch to “the part-
Kenyan president’s ancestral dis-
like of the British Empire.”
Some say fears of tension be-
tween Mr. Johnson and Mr. Biden
are overblown.
“It’s part of the job for American
presidents to get along with prime
ministers,” said Tom Tugendhat, a
Conservative member of Parlia-
ment who is chairman of the For-
eign Affairs Committee and has
spoken with advisers to Mr. Biden.
Still, there are potential land
mines, not least Northern Ireland.
A devoted Irish-American, Mr. Bi-
den will fiercely defend Ireland’s
interests, as will his allies in the
Democratic Party’s Irish lobby on
Capitol Hill. In speeches, Mr. Bi-
den’s go-to literary reference is
from ‘‘Easter 1916,’’ a poem by the
Irish poet William Butler Yeats
about the Irish uprising against
British rule.
British diplomats gamely point
out that Mr. Biden has English
roots, too. He has talked of a great-
great-great grandfather who was
a captain in the British East IndiaTrading Company. But they say
that as far as Brexit goes, his pri-
mary concern is likely to be the
preservation of the Good Friday
Agreement, the Clinton-era ac-
cord that ended decades of sectar-
ian strife in Northern Ireland.
“Biden is very keen on his Irish
Catholic roots, though he has
British ones too,” Mr. Westmacott
said. “If the U.K. ends up with a no
deal or other Brexit outcome
which is bad news for Ireland, he
will not be impressed.”
So far, Mr. Johnson has avoided
that problem by striking a with-
drawal agreement with the Euro-
pean Union that leaves an open
border on the island of Ireland.
Trade is another area where Mr.
Biden could prove frustrating. Mr.
Trump’s promise of a blockbuster
deal with Britain had already be-
gun to fade, with his trade repre-
sentative, Robert Lighthizer, say-
ing last month it was unlikely be-
fore the election.
British officials recently floated
the idea of both countries joining
the successor agreement to the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, which
Mr. Trump pulled out of in 2017, as
a way to sidestep the thorny is-
sues in a direct negotiation.
But even if Mr. Biden were to re-
join T.P.P. — a big if — analysts
noted that its provisions on food
sanitation were largely written by
the United States and would raise
the same objections that have
stymied trans-Atlantic talks.
“In other words,” said Sam
Lowe, a trade expert at the Center
for European Reform, “the chlo-
rine chicken debate is here to
stay.”After Years of Mollifying Trump, U.K. Ponders Life Without Him
British politicians worry that Joseph R. Biden Jr. would not prioritize a U.S.-Britain trade deal and would champion Irish interests.HANNAH YOON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESBy MARK LANDLERHow the U.S. election
results may alter the
‘special relationship.’
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan —
Some of the most intense border
clashes between Pakistan and Af-
ghanistan in recent years left at
least 15 civilians dead on the Af-
ghan side on Thursday, officials
said.
Afghanistan accused Pakistani
forces of firing heavy artillery into
civilian areas after protests by
communities on both sides who
were demanding the reopening of
a nearby border crossing that Pa-
kistan had closed to try to limit the
spread of the coronavirus.
Hayatullah Hayat, the governor
of Kandahar Province, where the
clashes occurred, said the worst
barrage of Pakistani artillery
started around 7 p.m. and struck
the Spin Boldak area. In addition
to the deaths, at least 80 other ci-
vilians were wounded, he said. Af-
ghan security officials said they
had retaliated with rockets. Social
media videos apparently filmed
from the Pakistani side showed
the dark sky lit up by intense
crossfire.
A delegation from the local Pa-
kistani government in Balu-
chistan Province had arrived at
the border to assess the situation,
officials in Pakistan said.
Gen. Yasin Zia, the chief of Af-
ghanistan’s army, has ordered the
three army corps stationed along
the border areas to be “fully ready
to retaliate to the Pakistani mili-
tary in kind” and put his country’s
special forces and air force on the
“highest alert,” Afghanistan’s De-
fense Ministry said in a state-
ment. The ministry estimated the
number of dead at nine, including
a child.
Movement across the porous
border had been restricted by the
Pakistani side in recent months
over concern about the pandemic,
which has hit both countries hard.
The restrictions particularly af-
fected communities on two sides
of the Chaman crossing, people
who rely on easy border trade, ei-
ther as laborers or smugglers, for
a living.
For several weeks, protesters
had staged a sit-in on the Paki-
stani side of the crossing in
Chaman demanding the resump-
tion of normal flow. In June, Paki-
stan reopened for commercial
trucks, but the crossing remained
shut for travelers and laborers.
The border was opened for trav-
elers stuck on the two sides on
Wednesday, but the protest to al-
low the routine crossing of labor-
ers had continued.
The situation grew tense on the
Pakistani side on Thursday, with
reports of Pakistani forces open-
ing fire on protesters during
clashes and killing at least two
people. The protesters set fire to a
Covid-19 quarantine facility. When
thousands of travelers stuck on
the Afghan side rushed for the
crossing in the chaos, they were
met by Pakistani fire that also
struck Afghan border police facili-
ties. The situation erupted into
full-on clashes that intensified late
into the night, witnesses said.
Adeel Ahmad, a provincial offi-
cial in Baluchistan, said Pakistani
security forces had denied they
targeted civilians and had only
fired shots into the air to disperse
protesters and maintain order.
“The daily wage workers, espe-
cially, who work on both sides of
the border are most hard-pressed
and have demanded from the gov-
ernment to lift the restrictions on
movement and economic activi-
ty,” Mr. Ahmed said. “The locals
say that we can no longer tolerate
hunger and unemployment and
want a solution to the current im-
passe. The locals are also resisting
the government’s plans to intro-
duce passport and biometric sys-
tems for cross-border movement.”
Afghan officials and residents
in Spin Boldak District said heavy
artillery fire from the Pakistani
side forced hundreds of families to
flee their homes from border vil-
lages last night.
The clashes at the southern bor-
der came just a week after Afghan
officials said Pakistani forces had
fired dozens of mortar shells into
the Sarkano District of eastern
Kunar Province, killing eight civil-
ians.
The two countries share a long
border, about 1,500 miles, that was
drawn by the British in the 19th
century and that left ethnic Pash-
tun tribes split. Consecutive Af-
ghan governments have ques-
tioned the legitimacy of the divi-
sion, known as the Durand Line,
as an official border. Efforts by Pa-
kistan’s government to build re-
inforced fences and security
checkpoints along the border
have angered Afghan officials and
communities in the area.Afghans’ Clash
With Pakistan
Over Border
Kills 15 People
By TAIMOOR SHAH
and MUJIB MASHALTaimoor Shah reported from Kan-
dahar and Mujib Mashal from Ka-
bul, Afghanistan. Reporting was
contributed by Salman Masood in
Islamabad, Pakistan, and Fahim
Abed in Kabul, Afghanistan.