President Donald Trump ought to give the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots a call ahead of his "half-baked" plan to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a New York Times opinion columnist suggested Tuesday.
Trump is scheduled to meet with Putin on Friday in Anchorage, Alaska. The meeting will focus mainly on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the potential for a ceasefire.
Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for the Times who writes about foreign policy and domestic politics, gave Trump a piece of advice: ask Robert Kraft how a meeting with Putin can go south. Kraft, he said, "knows what it’s like to be fleeced by the Russian president."
Kraft showed Putin one of his $25,000 Super Bowl rings during a 2005 trip with other American business leaders. And Putin never gave it back.
“And he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’” Kraft said in 2013. “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”
Kraft said the Bush administration urged him to pretend the ring was a gift, Stephens said.
"Putin later mocked Kraft’s complaint and suggested that the ring was embarrassingly cheap," Stephens added.
Trump is an admirer of Putin's "gangsterism," he added, but "he won’t want to emerge from the meeting as Putin’s poodle." Stephens warned there are many avenues in which Trump's summit could go awry, but there's also an opportunity to accomplish something "useful." Namely, he said, by giving a "good-faith" effort to allow Russia to cut its losses and end its invasion, even if the country will likely rebuff the offer.
Stephens said Trump ought to work with Europe to seize $300 billion in frozen Russian government assets to fund Ukraine's purchases of Western arms, and sign a bill that would implement steep 500% tariffs on all goods and services imported from countries that buy Russian oil and uranium. Stephens also called on Trump to supply Ukraine with F-16s and other weapons.
"The choice between these two sets of options — the off-ramp versus the road to hell — should be Putin’s to make," Stephens said. "Though public opinion counts for almost nothing in Putin’s Russia, Russians should still know that their president was offered an honorable peace and refused it."