As the leaders of the US and Russia prepare to meet in Alaska, analysts are trying to predict the potential policy implications of the historic summit. In contrast to the normal patterns of analysis of opaque autocracies and transparent democracies, the tricky part of this equation is not Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but US President Donald Trump. Putin’s interests are generally clear and his policies are relatively consistent. It is Trump that veers between flattering and condemning Putin, and alternately painting Russia or Ukraine as the more recalcitrant party. The problem of understanding Trump and anticipating his moves is no easier for Putin and his team than it is for anyone else. But Putin here is at an added disadvantage: with as much intelligence as the Russians no doubt have about the goings on in Washington and especially in the White House, they have repeatedly failed to understand how their actions are likely to be received in the United States and what repercussions that will have. The Russian leadership keeps making the same mistake: they assume that the American political system basically operates like their own, in which the leader is relatively free to interpret and act in the national interest on the world stage, without too much regard for domestic politics. This fundamental flaw has hurt Russia in the past, and it will likely do so again.

This is not a new issue. In fact, despite the historic successes of Soviet and Russian intelligence in penetrating the US government, the problem has led the Kremlin’s various administrations to repeatedly misinterpret and misunderstand American foreign policy. It contributed to the USSR’s decision to green light North Korea’s 1950 invasion of the South, when Josef Stalin assumed that the United States would not react, failing to understand the importance of the domestic anti-Communist sentiment since the revolution in China and its impact on the Truman White House. It made Moscow one of the last places in the world to see that the United States would eventually abandon South Vietnam to its fate; Soviet leaders assumed that the US would never leave South Vietnam, discounting the domestic pressure of the anti-war movement. During Richard Nixon’s presidency, it led Leonid Brezhnev to first dismiss Congressional opposition to détente, particularly in the form of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, and then to interpret Watergate as a military coup by hardliners opposed to détente. The one constant in all of these mistakes has been Moscow’s failure to understand and account for the vicissitudes of American domestic politics and their impact on the people sitting across from them at the negotiating table.

More recently, Putin’s failures to understand the dynamic of American domestic politics has made achieving his ambitions much more difficult than he anticipated. Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has shaped American policy toward Russia in ways that Putin did not anticipate. Before 2016, the Democrats had not been particularly concerned about Putin. When US-Russian relations hit a nadir in 2008 after the invasion of Georgia, Obama came to power and famously offered Russia a “reset.” During the 2012 election, he and others mocked Mitt Romney for calling Russia America’s number one enemy. The US’s response to the seizure of Crimea in 2014 was relatively muted. Then came the 2016 election and the Russian collusion story, and polls show that party attitudes toward Russia flipped nearly overnight, with Democrats now being the ones who see it as an enemy and Republican views of Russia improving. This animosity toward Putin among Democrats has continued unabated, in large part because of their association of Putin with Trump: essentially Democrats see Putin as an extension of their domestic political enemy. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 no doubt failed to adequately account for this. He did not foresee the strength of the American reaction because he didn’t understand the depth of the animosity he had engendered towards himself among the center-left of American politics.

Now, once again, Putin is going into a high-stakes meeting with an American leader trying to figure what Trump, and therefore “America,” wants without taking into account two things: 1)”America” is not a unified entity with a single wish list, and 2)Trump, like any American president, is likely to prioritize domestic political considerations over foreign ones. Putin and his team therefore seem to imagine, as they frustratingly have for nearly a decade now, that Trump is far more free to depart from the status quo of American policy than he has proven to be in practice. According to some commentators, sophisticated Russian analysts of the United States are even thinking that, if things don’t work out with Trump, they might have a better chance with J.D. Vance in 2029, whom they see as a “true isolationist.” Once again, this betrays a failure to understand the dynamics of American politics. If Putin fails with Trump, and comes to be seen as an antagonist of the White House and therefore the MAGA movement, a future President Vance will not be free politically to strike some grand bargain with Moscow that serves Putin’s interests.

For all the technical competence and sophistication of Russian intelligence gathering on and analysis of the United States, they could benefit from remembering a line from one of America’s most venerable politicians. As former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill famously said “All politics is local.” Russian analysts can be forgiven for not understanding the significance of this, because they fall prey to a common mistake: seeing in others a mirror vision of yourself. Domestic politics are indeed a much smaller consideration in the foreign policies of Russian leaders, and those leaders do tend to imagine themselves acting as interpreters and defenders of “Russian interests” over the long durée. Russian analysts tend to see American democracy, like their own, as a rigged game, in which the powerful always ultimately get their way and act with few constraints. But they are wrong, and this failure has hurt them in the past and will likely keep hurting them in the future.