It's hard to think of anyone at The Atlantic who likes President Trump less than Julia Ioffe. We are talking about a reporter fired from Politico for an anti-Trump tweet. That's what makes this summary all the more entertaining.
“We have to figure out what this country’s strategy is,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on a political talk show on TVRain, an independent Russian channel, just hours after Tillerson touched down in Moscow, and hours before meetings were set to begin. “No one understands it right now. If you do, share your appraisal with us,” she said, flustered, to us journalists interviewing her. “We don’t understand what they’re going to do in Syria, and not only there. No one understands what they’re going to do in the Middle East, which is a very complicated region. … No one understands what they’re going to do with Iran."
"“We’re surprised by the change of rhetoric and policy of Trump,” said Igor Korotchenko, the editor of National Defense Magazine, who has close connections to the Russian defense ministry. “Tillerson is just the executor of his boss’s policy. And that’s what really does surprise us. We understand that things in America change quickly, but this is … he’s jumping from one extreme to the other. We’re ready for dialogue. We just have to understand what they want.”
“Tillerson has to explain what Trump’s foreign policy is. What is Trump’s foreign policy?” said political scientist Andranik Migranyan, an old classmate of Lavrov’s who ran a Russian think tank in New York that worked on defending Moscow’s position. Lavrov’s thinking on confronting this new twist, Migranyan told me, is “‘You explain to us what it is you want, and then we can talk.’ The whole world is waiting for them to figure this out and stop messing with us.”
Except what if Trump's foreign policy is "messing" with rivals. Much like it's been his election strategy.
Amateur fighters can be more dangerous than experienced fighters whose strategies are known. Presidents have tended to come wrapped in think tanks with known worldviews. Even if they're inexperienced, they're quickly slotted.
But President Trump hates being predictable. He has no real ideological coloration. He shifts with circumstances. And that makes him dangerously unpredictable. Russia did know the strike was coming at least a week ahead. The Wikileaks propaganda about Trump's poll numbers makes it clear that they were already looking for a way to spin what was going to happen. But they don't understand the thinking.
And the real goal of serious intel is not just to predict what your enemy will do, but why he will do it. And there Trump has them stumped. If they can't predict why he will do something, they can't predict what he will do next. And that's a terrifying situation for a world power to be in.