When the nation’s intelligence chiefs go before Congress on Tuesday to provide their first public "Worldwide Threat Assessment" of President Trump’s second term, they’ll face an extraordinary choice.
Do they stick with their long-running conclusion about President Vladimir Putin of Russia, that his goal is to crush the Ukrainian government and "undermine the United States and the West?"
Or do they cast Putin in the terms Trump and his top negotiator with Russia are describing him with these days: as a trustworthy future business partner who simply wants to end a nasty war, get control of parts of Ukraine that are rightly his and resume a regular relationship with the United States?
The vexing choice has become all the more stark in recent days since Steve Witkoff, one of Trump’s oldest friends from the real estate world and his chosen envoy to the Mideast and Russia, has begun picking up many of Putin’s favorite talking points.
Witkoff wrote off European fears that Russia could violate whatever ceasefire is agreed upon and a peacekeeping force must be assembled to deter Moscow. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, the pro-MAGA podcaster, Witkoff said the peacekeeping idea was "a combination of a posture and a pose" by America’s closest NATO allies.
It is a view, he said, that was born of a "sort of notion of we’ve all got to be like Winston Churchill, the Russians are going to march across Europe." He continued, "I think that’s preposterous."
Just over three years after Russian troops poured into Kyiv and tried to take out the government, Witkoff argued that Putin didn’t really want to take over all of Ukraine.
"Why would they want to absorb Ukraine?" he asked Carlson. "For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine." All Russia seeks, he argues, is "stability there."
Of all the head-spinning reversals in Washington these days, perhaps it is the Trump administration’s view of Russia and its seeming willingness to believe Putin that leave allies, intelligence officials and diplomats most disoriented.
Until Trump took office, it was the consensus view of the United States and its allies that they had been hopelessly naïve about Russia’s true ambitions for far too long — that they had failed to listen carefully to Putin when he first argued, in 2007, that there were parts of Russia that needed to be restored to the motherland. Then he invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea and sent the military — out of uniform — to conduct a guerrilla war in the Donbas.
Still, sanctions were slow to be applied, and Europe was far too slow to rearm — a point Trump himself makes when he presses the Europeans for more funds to defend themselves.
Now, Trump refuses to acknowledge the obvious, that Russia invaded Ukraine. He has been openly contradicted by several European leaders, who say that even if the United States plans to seek a normalization of relations with Russia, they do not. "I don’t trust Putin," the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, told The New York Times last week.
But for the American intelligence agencies, whose views are supposed to be rooted in a rigorous analysis of covertly collected and open-source analysis, there is no indication so far that any of their views about Putin and his ambitions have changed. So, it will be up to the new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, to walk the fine line of describing Russia as a current adversary and future partner.
*The New York Times
