Trump Once Wanted to Negotiate With Russia Over Nukes. Then Mueller Happened

More than 30 years ago, when he was still a builder in Manhattan, Donald Trump said he had one 

great ambition: He wanted then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan to appoint him America’s envoy to Moscow to negotiate a nuclear arms deal. “It’ll take one hour of discussion before the Cold War is over,” Trump was said to have boasted at the time.

Plainly, the Trumpian grandiosity was always there, but what happened to the ambition? Now that he’s president, Trump doesn’t need to wait for an appointment to try his hand at nuclear negotiation. Only last year the president called nuclear weapons “the biggest problem in the world.” And yet Trump has barely mentioned the issue while his administration announced Friday it is pulling out of the three-decade-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and is possibly setting its sights on former President Barack Obama’s 2011 New START treaty, the strategic arms reduction pact that will expire about two weeks into the next presidential term if it isn’t extended. Negotiations on such an extension would need to begin soon.

Trump has always yearned for the big deal, and he’s demonstrated that he’s not fond of any treaty he didn’t negotiate himself, especially if it was Obama’s doing. Trump pulled out of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, Paris climate pact, and Trans-Pacific Partnership, and he replaced former President Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade deal with the slightly retooled U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, even though the not-yet-confirmed accord retains most of the provisions of the original one.

But the nuclear arms arena is especially wide open and ripe for fresh presidential negotiation, many nuclear experts say. While some lament the likely demise of the INF pact—having served notice, Washington now has six months to formally withdraw—they also acknowledge that to some extent the treaty was based on outdated threats and technology. And they say Trump could, at long last, put his own stamp on nuclear arms negotiations in this new era.

“I would tell the president that, given the decision on INF, there’s an opportunity here not only to preserve New START but to make your own groundbreaking agreement with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” said Lynn Rusten, who served as senior director for arms control on Obama’s National Security Council. “And you can do it relatively easily and quickly by extending New START. You don’t need new underlying verification and inspection procedures. You can just build on it.”

In contrast to the INF Treaty, which Washington has accused Russia of violating for years, the Trump administration has not questioned whether Putin is adequately observing the New START treaty.

There may be several reasons why Trump is not moving ahead on nuclear weapons negotiations, despite his long-ago ambitions. One, they are notably difficult and abstruse, and Trump is not known as a details person (though the same reputation did not stop Reagan, who signed the INF Treaty in 1987). Second, Trump has purged his administration of moderate internationalists who tend to favor diplomacy—with Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly the most recent departures. His ultra-hawkish national security advisor, John Bolton, has long inveighed against both the INF and New START treaties.

But the main reason may have more to do with the multiple investigations into Trump’s Russia ties, especially special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the 2016 Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Moscow. Last July, shortly before Trump flew to Helsinki for his first summit with Putin, he was asked by reporters what he hoped to accomplish. “No more nuclear weapons anywhere in the world, no more wars, no more problems, no more conflicts,” he declared. Trump also said he thought he and Putin would have “an extraordinary relationship.”

The summit, however, was widely deemed a political disaster for Trump, and it was perhaps the last time the president spoke in such positive terms of his relationship with the Russian leader. At the summit, Trump fumbled by appearing to accept Putin’s denials of interference in the 2016 election over the findings of his own U.S. intelligence agencies, and since then the president has been hemmed in by almost constant questions in the media about whether he has been compromised by Putin and Russian intelligence—financially, sexually, or in some other way. The FBI at one point even opened up an investigation into whether Trump was a Russian counterintelligence asset. At the G-20 summit in Argentina in November 2018, Trump felt pressured to cancel his one-on-one with Putin (though he later held an “informal” meeting, the White House said, at which once again no official note-takers were reportedly present).

The oddity of Trump’s furtive relations with Putin under the shadow of the Russia probe is that he had previously said one of his goals as president was to dramatically improve relations with Moscow. And shortly before the Helsinki summit, Trump said he planned to discuss nuclear arms reduction with Putin.

“If we can do something to substantially reduce them, I mean, ideally get rid of them, maybe that’s a dream, but certainly it’s a subject that I’ll be bringing up with him,” Trump said. “The proliferation is a tremendous, I mean, to me, it’s the biggest problem in the world, nuclear weapons, biggest problem in the world.”