Washington: (WN) Some Pentagon officials
believe Russia is testing President Donald Trump with aggressive moves across
the globe. Moscow recently deployed a banned land-based cruise missile,
dispatched a spy ship up the Atlantic coast and buzzed an American warship in
the Black Sea.
"They were likely intended to test the
new administration," one defense official told WN. "The Russians are
doing different things to see how the new administration will respond," a
second defense official added.
The developments raise the question of how
the new White House occupant will address Russian assertiveness and whether,
after complimenting Russian President Vladimir Putin and playing down Russia's
adversarial relationship with the US, Trump will resort to any confrontational
responses.
One month into the unusual presidency of
Donald Trump, his most senior cabinet members were deployed to Brussels, Bonn
and Munich this week to reassure nervous Europeans that everything would be
okay.
The Europeans heard from Defense Secretary
James Mattis that the NATO military alliance was not "obsolete" after
all, despite Trump's repeated suggestions to the contrary. And they were told
by Vice President Mike Pence that Russia would be "held accountable"
for its actions in Ukraine, despite Trump's friendly overtures to Russian
President Vladimir Putin.
But if the aim of the visits was to reassure
Europe that the pillars of U.S. foreign policy are fully intact, they fell
short of the mark, European diplomats, politicians and analysts gathered in
Munich said.
"What we heard here is not
reassuring," Ruprecht Polenz, former head of the foreign affairs committee
in the German parliament, told Reuters after Pence's speech to the Munich
Security Conference. "There is absolutely no vision for how we are going
to work together, going forward."
Pence was the highest-ranking member of the
Trump team to travel to Europe and his address was eagerly awaited. Eight years
ago in the same hall, his predecessor Joe Biden made headlines with a promise
to "reset" relations with Russia.
But unlike Biden, Pence came to Munich with a
fatal handicap: the perception, fuelled by the circumstances surrounding the
recent resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn, that he is not
part of Trump's inner circle.
"His mission was always going to be
hard, but it was made even more so by the questions about his lack of influence
inside the White House," said Derek Chollet, a top defence policy adviser
to former president Barack Obama who is now with the German Marshall Fund of the
United States.
***Robotic
Salute***
The vice president tried to tackle these
doubts head-on by making clear at the start of his speech that he was speaking
for Trump. But then he went on to mention the president 19 times in the course
of the 20-minute speech, prompting one audience member, the author and
historian Robert Kagan, to dismiss the address as a "robotic salute to the
man in power".
"Pence and Mattis and Tillerson can come
here and talk about the importance of the transatlantic relationship and NATO -
and that is all good," said Elmar Brok, head of the foreign affairs
committee of the European Parliament and a party ally of German Chancellor
Angela Merkel.
"But we don't know what's coming on
Twitter tomorrow morning," he said, referring to Trump's penchant for
spilling out policy statements via social media. Flynn's resignation has
deepened the mystery over who Trump will listen to on foreign policy, although
his chief strategist Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner are both seen as
influential.
One European diplomat likened the challenge
of figuring out who to listen to in the Trump administration to the task of
"Kremlinologists" during the Cold War. Ulrich Speck, a foreign policy
analyst at the Elcano think tank in Brussels, said the conundrum that Henry
Kissinger evoked when he famously asked who he should call when he wanted to
talk to "Europe" seemed to have been turned on its head.
"Now Europe is asking who it should call
if it wants to talk to the United States," Speck said. Besides his
reassurances on NATO and Russia relations, Pence tried to assuage fears that
the United States is moving away from democratic values under Trump, who has
attacked the media and judiciary repeatedly since taking power a month ago.
This is President Trump's promise,"
Pence said. "We will stand with Europe, today and every day, because we
are bound together by the same noble ideals – freedom, democracy, justice, and
the rule of law."
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