Everything is going according to plan with Trump

The absence of high-profile breakthrough decisions following the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at the G20 summit is rather a positive signal, Russian political scientist Evgeny Minchenko explains in his column in the Izvestia newspaper.

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“It is impossible to talk about either a new “reset” or “Russia’s turn towards the West.” And it seems to me that this is precisely a positive moment that we will evaluate in the future.

I carefully studied the history of Russian-American relations. And I can say that both Gorbachev and Yeltsin gave the Americans a very unpleasant impression when they came with some kind of concessions without preliminary consideration.

For example, in the memoirs of one of the American politicians there are memories of how Gorbachev met with Bush Sr. and rolled out some new initiative to reduce nuclear weapons. But America has a completely different management culture: an initiative must be previously discussed, worked out at the diplomatic and administrative level, and only then announced. So Bush Sr. simply could not understand anything - the idea was not discussed in advance, neither he nor his entourage knew anything about it.

And Gorbachev’s idea did not work at all in these conditions - they say, now I will stun everyone with my openness and generosity, and the relationship will go like clockwork. On the contrary, the Americans perceived it with suspicion, they were literally ready to look for what was wrong, because that’s not how they do things. It is customary to work out the issue in advance - as is the case with the ceasefire agreements in Southern Syria. It seems to me that this Gorbachev-Yeltsin style of diplomacy is not something that should be adopted,” explains the author.

“Moreover, we already had a period when Russia acted as a military ally of the United States in the fight against global terrorism. We supported them after the September 11th terrorist attacks, provided transit opportunities, allowed their military bases into Central Asia, established a NATO transshipment base in Ulyanovsk, and provided intelligence information. And in response we received NATO expansion to the east. And this despite the fact that the personal relations between Putin and Bush Jr. were very good.

But with Obama, for example, the relationship did not work out. And, despite this, it was under Obama that a reset of relations took place, and the pressure on Russia was not severe, at least until 2013, before the Olympics and Crimea,” Minchenko recalls.