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Obama seeking to hinder Trump-Putin rapprochement: Analyst

Monday, 02 January 2017 11:20 AM [ Last Update: Monday, 02 January 2017 11:20 AM ]

US President Barack Obama (L), Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) and US President-elect Donald Trump (R)

The relations between the White House and the Kremlin have slumped to a new low, just before US President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. Outgoing President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats accusing them of engagement in acts of espionage. Moscow has rejected Washington’s allegations that it orchestrated cyber attacks against Democrats during the 2016 election campaign. In a move hailed as politically prudent, President Vladimir Putin refrained from a tit-for-tat response to the US move. He also congratulated Trump in a New Year’s greeting message, while snubbing the outgoing president.

James Jatras, a former US Senate foreign policy analyst from Washington, believes that President Obama has been seeking to make it difficult for his successor, Trump, to amend ties with Russia.

The Obama administration’s expulsion of the Russian diplomats was a “purely political” gesture, done with the intention of impeding a future rapprochement between the two countries, Jatras told Press TV.

“Clearly this was designed for political goals to try to box the incoming Trump administration in and to spoil prospects for rapprochement with Moscow,” the analyst noted.

Jatras criticized the outgoing administration’s hasty move against Russia, and said, “Even if President Obama is convinced that the Russians had actually engaged in the kind of activity he claims, [since] the evidence for that is quite flimsy, there is no reason for him to rush this through in the closing days of his presidency.”

However, Jatras said, President Obama’s tactic against both the incoming administration and Russia failed to deliver, because Putin declined to take the bait, and that “really made President Obama look even more ridiculous.”

Trump, he explained, has been quite consistent in stating that [he seeks closer ties with the Kremlin] even under very intense political attacks from both parties. He has not backed down and he still wants to normalize ties with Russia, the commentator added.

Jatras also mentioned that no concrete evidence had been provided by the US government of the alleged Russian hacks.

“What the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security released was kind of a description of how those activities are conducted,” but “very little that indicates that the Russians were directly responsible for any hacks on the Democratic National Committee,” he concluded.

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