The GOP candidates don’t like Vladimir Putin, but they disagree on how to deal with him

Vladimir Putin was a key antagonist in this week’s Republican debate. There appeared to be consensus across the packed sound stage of 11 candidates on a couple of points. First, that Putin is a bad actor. And second, that weakness on the part of Barack Obama has played right into the hands of the Russian president.

But a point of disagreement emerged as well.

Donald Trump was asked if he would be willing to sit down and negotiate with Putin. Trump began by saying that Putin has, “absolutely no respect for President Obama. Zero.”

“I would talk to [Putin]. I would get along with him,” Trump went on to say.

When the same question was put to Carly Fiorina, she had a starkly different take. “I wouldn’t talk to him at all, we’ve talked way too much to him,” Fiorina said. And she listed several specific steps that she would take as US president to deal with Putin.

“I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland. I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic States. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message,” Fiorina said.

There is probably more agreement in both parties about how to handle Putin’s Russia than the campaign rhetoric might suggest, according to Michael McFaul of Stanford University. He served as President Obama’s ambassador in Moscow from 2012 to 2014.

However, “there’s a fundamental debate within the Republican party,” McFaul says, “about the approach toward Putin.”

Trump suggests that by sheer force of will, he would be able to persuade Putin to pull back from Ukraine and Syria, if only the billionaire negotiator and dealmaker had the opportunity to sit down and negotiate with the ex-KGB man, one on one.

“It’s rather naïve,” McFaul says. “I’m not very optimistic that any conversation, Democrat or Republican, would be able to do that just because they had a good conversation with President Putin.”

McFaul says Fiorina’s contention that a combination of pressure and refusing to negotiate with Putin would get the Russian leader to change his ways is similarly wrongheaded. He says both coercive means and diplomacy are needed to achieve US foreign policy objectives with respect to Russia.

“That’s exactly what Ronald Reagan did during the Cold War,” McFaul says. “He had a mix of coercive strategies, but was also ready to engage when he thought it was in the national interest.”

If Putin himself was listening in to the GOP debate, it is difficult to know exactly what he made of the candidates’ statements about Russian behavior. But McFaul says there does seem to be agreement among Putin’s advisers and pro-Kremlin people in the Russian media.

“They are hopeful that the next [US] president will be more favorable towards Russia than President Obama,” McFaul says. “They think President Obama has been confrontational, he’s returned things to the Cold War, and they think that anybody will be better than Obama.”

But they are partial to one GOP candidate above all the others, McFaul says.

“They somehow believe, because he’s a business man, because he’s different, and he has said that he wants to sit down and to talk with Putin, they think that he [Trump] would be the person most likely to benefit Russia’s national interests, should he become president,” McFaul says.