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OPINION:
After his final meeting in 2000 with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, President Clinton remarked that Mr. Putin is “very smart and thoughtful. I think we can do a lot of good with him.”
In 2001, President George W. Bush commented during a press conference in Slovenia that he got a “sense of Putin’s soul.” President Obama said after his first meeting with Mr. Putin, “There’s an excellent opportunity to put U.S.-Russia relations on a much stronger footing.”
The Obama administration pursued a “Russia-reset” policy, which failed to hold Mr. Putin accountable for turning defector Alexander Litvinenko into a human dirty bomb on the streets of London after poisoning him with polonium 210, launching a massive cyberattack on NATO member Estonia in 2007 and invading Georgia in 2008. Russia invaded Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, used its military to attack civilians and induce a massive flow of displaced people to support Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his use of chemical weapons, and launched malicious cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure and private business.
After a June 2021 summit, President Biden said the “tone of the meeting was good, positive. The bottom line is I told Putin that we need to have some basic rules of the road that we need to abide by.”
Eight months later, Mr. Putin launched the most destructive land war in Europe since World War II.
U.S. presidents have a history going back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt of optimistically and, at times, naively believing they could negotiate in good faith with the dictator sitting in the Kremlin.
On one notable occasion, we got it right, largely thanks to Col. Oleg Gordievsky, who died last month. Gordievsky was a high-level British Intelligence penetrator of the KGB during the 1970s and 1980s. Before being exfiltrated from Moscow in a daring operation, Gordievsky passed his handlers a treasure trove of intelligence and presciently identified Mikhail Gorbachev as the most likely next Soviet leader.
Deftly using Gordievsky’s intelligence, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher courted Gorbachev during his visit to London in 1984.
President Trump would do well to emulate Reagan’s peace through strength strategy, which brilliantly combined U.S. soft power with military force projection. Reagan branded the Soviet Union an evil empire, eloquently appealed to Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and countered Soviet expansion worldwide while negotiating comprehensive nuclear arms reductions and setting the stage for the end of the Cold War.
Mr. Putin operates out of a KGB-controlled cocoon. In public, he deliberately spews disinformation to deceive his adversaries and keep them off balance.
Mr. Putin desperately wants to conceal the stark reality that he is losing. His army has been decimated. Its elite units have been chewed up in a meat grinder war, which has yielded Russia only just over 10% of Ukrainian territory since the invasion and cost hundreds of thousands of casualties. Russian army stocks of tanks, armored vehicles and artillery have been severely depleted.
No matter what false image he deliberately projects, Mr. Putin has no friendships, only interests that are antithetical to ours. He has repeatedly stated that Ukraine is not a real country and that he invaded to defend ethnic Russians, both false claims that hark back to Adolf Hitler’s twisted justifications for annexing Sudetenland before conquering Czechoslovakia. Seeking to win at the negotiating table what his army has failed to conquer on the battlefield, Mr. Putin’s maximalist demands are meant to ensure Ukraine would be an easy mark down the road for a follow-up invasion.
Mr. Putin is negotiating with the United States, with backing from his closest allies Iran, North Korea and China, because he wants to make it appear that Russia is on a level playing field with the U.S., to which he and his cronies have always derisively referred as Russia’s “Main Enemy.”
Mr. Trump has publicly stated he trusts Mr. Putin to do the right thing for a peace deal, but last week, growing exasperated over Mr. Putin’s behavior, he said he was “angry” and “pissed off” at the Russian leader.
Mr. Trump will rely on CIA Director John Ratcliffe and his intelligence community partners to uncloak Mr. Putin’s plans and intentions, including the extent to which Mr. Putin wants to induce us to accede to a bad deal to damage our global reputation rather than enhance it as a peace mediator and drive a wedge between the U.S. and our NATO allies.
To be successful, the Trump administration’s foreign policy must be grounded not in Mr. Putin’s duplicitous public statements but in the sort of exquisite human source intelligence that enabled Reagan’s victorious strategy toward Mr. Putin’s Soviet predecessors.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018.
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