Trump Plays ‘Ugly American’ While Putin Jokes

If one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's goals is to undermine American leadership in the world by driving a wedge between the U.S. and its Western partners, he likely is smiling today.

During his marathon annual call-in show on Thursday, Putin joked about a recent article in Germany's popular Die Welt that claimed President Donald Trump is pushing Europe into Russia's hands. The column came out before a string of leaders in Europe and Canada began openly criticizing the brash American leader ahead of his scheduled visit to Quebec for the annual summit of leading industrial nations, also known as the Group of Seven, or G-7.

"If we combine this with an earlier joke that Russia interfered in the U.S. election, all this sounds funny enough: We allegedly tampered with the presidential election in the U.S., and he gave us Europe as a reward," Putin quipped. "Complete nonsense. Or a joke, because it can't be serious."

Putin appears eager to cast Trump as the "Ugly American," a leader who is trampling on the goodwill of allies to profit the United States at their expense. It's a sentiment seemingly shared by a growing number of European leaders: As Trump arrives in Quebec for the G-7 summit before flying to Asia for an historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, relations between the U.S. and its closest partners is at its most frayed in decades.

French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, has made exhaustive attempts to build rapport with Trump after the U.S. leader last year withdrew his country from the Paris climate agreement. But those efforts did nothing to secure American commitment to the Iran nuclear deal, and Macron is threatening to isolate the United States further if it continues to ignore its partners' priorities, and skip signing an agreement on climate change at the end of the G-7 meeting. On Friday, Trump confirmed he will exit the summit early to head to Singapore for his meeting with Kim.

"The American President may not mind being isolated, but neither do we mind signing a 6 country agreement if need be," Macron tweeted on Thursday. "Because these 6 countries represent values, they represent an economic market which has the weight of history behind it and which is now a true international force."

Earlier this week, Washington antagonized the German government when the U.S. ambassador to the country, Richard Grenell made comments on Twitter and the Breitbart website supporting conservative European politicians.

In Canada, the G-7 host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, facing pressure at home from the political left over the expansion of a oil pipeline in Alberta and British Columbia, has had a series of spats with Trump in recent weeks culminating in a series of dismissive tweets from the American leader.

[READ: Trump Plows Into G-7 Summit.]

"The Europeans, Japanese and Canadians all feel like they've been wrong-footed by the American president on trade," Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, wrote in a column that appeared in Axios. "After their collective irritation with U.S. withdrawals from the Paris climate agreement and Iran nuclear deal, they're no longer hiding behind pleasantries."

"The Trump administration has piled on and the U.S.–led order has crumbled more quickly than it otherwise would have," Bremmer wrote, saying the summit will be the most dysfunctional G-7 meeting in the bloc's history "by a long margin."

Back in Moscow, Putin's joke about Trump on his call-in show isn't the only time the Russian leader cracked a pun at Trump's expense. He also dinged the American leader for imposing new tariffs for steel and aluminum on Canada, Mexico and the European Union – a tactic that has drawn sharp rebuke from those countries, but which Putin mocked with a verbal slap at a recent Russian military action that had previously united the West.

"What are they being punished for? Did they 'annex Crimea' as many of our partners say? No. This has to do with the pragmatic national interests of the United States, as its current leadership sees them," Putin said.

The Russian president's comments reveal his growing confidence about the wedge he is driving between Washington and its Western allies, says Ivan Kurilla, a history professor at the European University at St. Petersburg and an expert on Russian-American relations.

[STUDY: World has become less peaceful.]

The G-7 summit isn't the only major international bloc meeting this week. Shortly after completing his call-in show Putin traveled to Beijing for meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, before attending the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization, another international economic and security summit that will include Iranian President Hassan Rouhani among its attendees.

Aside from general discussions about international coordination, the countries at the Shanghai meeting – but particularly China and Russia – will focus their attention on Trump and Kim's meeting in Singapore next week.

"This is the right place at the right time for Putin to be in Beijing," says Mark Simakovsky, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.

Xi and Putin will hash out scenarios for how the U.S.-North Korea summit could turn out, and try to deflect any continued U.S. pressure campaign on North Korea, Simakovsky says. They'll also prepare for dealing with American frustration if the talks stall, and look for ways to push North Korea toward conditions that include a withdrawal of the U.S. military presence in the region.

"Rouhani's potential visit with the Chinese president is also a key opportunity for Russia to solidify its stance in another part of the world where the U.S. and Russia have not necessarily agreed, and this is Syria," Simakovsky says. "It's a way to show they still support the [Iran nuclear deal], and showcase the U.S. is the outlier, the U.S. is isolating itself from the world, not Russia."

The G-7 summit would usually serve as an ideal forum to demonstrate publicly that's not the case.

"These trains have been destined for collision. Trump's long-established, and apparently unwavering, views about trade cut against the very raison d'être of the G-7," writes Tarun Chhabra, a foreign policy fellow with the Brookings Institution's Project on International Order and Strategy. The Trump administration, Chhabra wrote, could have used the G-7 summit as a moment to rally support from Europe and Japan around a common agenda, thereby increasing pressure on Beijing to help with North Korea.

"Imagine if he had done that, and then went on to Singapore to somehow draw blood from a stone: some sort of plausibly verifiable, phased deal to denuclearize North Korea. He would command tremendous, bipartisan approval for his foreign policy, especially leading into the U.S. midterm elections in November," Chhabra wrote."But Trump's antipathy toward U.S. alliances is, unfortunately, just as entrenched as his protectionist views on trade. And the missed opportunity vis-a-vis China is historic."