Many observers and U.S. allies calculated that President Trump intended to see a return to triangulation between the United States, Russia and China in Helsinki. And there were good reasons for that hypothesis.

At a press conference in 2015, Trump advocated the Kissinger line - keeping Russia and China divided so they would never ally themselves against Washington.

On that occasion, Trump said: “...One of the worst things that can happen to the United States is that Russia will approach China. We have led them to join the big oil deals that are being made. That's a horrible thing for our country. We have made them friends because of incompetent leadership.”

In an essay published by the Strategic Culture Foundation on 23 July last, with the signature of Alastair Crooke, a former M16 agent and British diplomat, it is speculated that perhaps, in Helsinki, Trump was doing something a little less strategic and more realistic - something more in line with the art of negotiation (Art of the Deal).

According to Crooke, over the decades, we have developed a fairly accurate mental model of how presidents are supposed to behave and how the policy-making process is supposed to be carried out. Bush and Obama were fully driven by that process. But obviously, Trump doesn't fit that model. The Trump process follows this order:

1) Identify a major target (tax cuts, balanced trade, a wall, etc.).

2) Identify the points of influence against anyone who stands in your way (elections, tariffs, jobs, etc.).

3) Announce some extreme threat against your opponent.

4) If the opponent backs down, mitigate the threat, declare victory and return home with a victory.

5) If the opponent responds, apply the principle of double or nothing.

6) Eventually, the escalation should lead to negotiations with the perception of a victory for Trump - even if it is more visual than real.

If we frame the Helsinki meeting within this perception of the Art of the Deal, we obtain that the divergences of vision between Russia and the USA are so substantial that the common ground is narrow and there is very little prospect of a "global strategic agreement". In fact, President Trump has little to offer Russia: the relief from sanctions is not in his (but Congress') power, and he could not give up on Ukraine, "even if Trump understood that the US and Europe made a bad buy with their coup d'état.”

According to the Russian journalist Rostislav Ishchenko, who specialises in the conflict in Ukraine, "We have a situation where both sides, even before the negotiations, knew that they could not reach agreement and did not even prepare for such a thing (no document was planned to be signed after the negotiations). At the same time, both sides needed the event to be successful. Trump is obviously blackmailing the European Union with a possible agreement with Russia. But Putin also needs to show Europe that there are other fish in the sea besides them.

Europe's position is clear. Not by chance, Trump, in listing Washington's enemies (the EU, China and Russia), made it clear that he sees Russia as a smaller problem than the EU given that there are virtually no economic contradictions with Moscow. The main "enemy" of the United States is not China, with whom the US has the largest negative trade balance, but the European Union, which Trump defined as the main trade competitor and which derives many unjustified economic benefits from its relationship with the US through political agreements.

In doing so, Trump resolves his political-military contradictions with Russia and, as a result, reduces the value of the EU as Washington's ally to zero.

Recently, after the NATO summit, Merkel began to speak clearly about Trump's hostility to Europe as unwarranted because of how much Europe has fought against Russia in the interests of the United States. Europe, which unlike China has not been engaged in diversifying its economic ties in the world and seemed increasingly dependent on access to the US market, is not prepared for a strong confrontation with the US.

Without having run the risk of pre-empting Trump on the issue of normalising relations with Russia, EU leaders were fatally afraid that Trump and Putin, despite the difficulties, would do the impossible and reach an agreement, because they both proved to be prepared for decisions that would change the fate of the world in an instant.

July 30, 2018.

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.