On Wednesday, July 18, Miller Center Senior Fellow Eric Edelman, a 30-year veteran diplomat, former ambassador to Finland and Turkey, and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, offered his thoughts on President Trump's controversial press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also assessed the president's performance during the NATO meeting that preceded it and the ongoing course of U.S. diplomacy. Below is an edited transcript of the interview.

Q: What was your initial reaction to President Trump's performance during his European trip? 

Edelman: Well, I spent the bulk of my career working on European affairs, served twice as an ambassador in Europe and was involved in the preparation of numerous NATO and U.S.-Soviet/U.S-Russian summits, and in most cases, most presidents that I served wanted to approach the Soviets or the Russians with a united alliance behind them. So the tendency was to try and hold  either a NATO summit or NATO ministerials that would bring the alliance together, so that you would maximize the strength of the Western position and the leverage of the president of United States.

Obviously, as is often the case with President Trump, he threw the usual playbook out the window.

Even before the NATO summit began, he started to harangue our NATO allies about their contributions to the common defense. That is a legitimate issue, one that was raised by President Bush as well as by President Obama, but the manner in which it was raised by the president just created enormous disruption to the NATO summit and cast doubt in the minds of a lot of allies about the president's willingness to support them and raised, I think, a concern about his willingness to make good on our alliance obligations.

He then went into a meeting with President Putin telling people it would be easier and better than his meeting with our allies, which sort of inverts the normal approach, and gave one of the most incredible public performances I've seen a President United States give, with the President of Russia by his side in Helsinki.

And his performance, I should add on that score, was sufficiently outside the norm that it engendered a massive outcry of criticism, not from the usual suspects, not from Democrats and never Trumpers, but from stalwart Republicans including some of his staunchest defenders, like a former speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich. 

Q: Is it a lack of understanding what the norm is or the president's willingness to violate that norm that's more disturbing here? 

Edelman: Well, I think both are disturbing honestly. One of the things about President Trump is it's clear that he has for a long time believed that American leaders of both parties for the last 75 years have been stupid. He frequently refers to our stupid leaders and the bad deals that they've negotiated and suggested that he, as the author of The Art of the Deal, is able to negotiate better deals. The problem, is that despite his views about this, which I think are quite strong, it's also pretty clear that he doesn't know the history or the substance of the policy very well. Nor is he very interested in preparation. All of the press accounts of the run up to the meeting in Helsinki, for instance, have suggested that he spent most of the weekend up playing golf at his Turnberry resort rather than prep for the meeting with President Putin. And presidents I've served with spent enormous amounts of time preparing for these meetings, absorbing briefing materials.

It's clear that he has for a long time believed that American leaders of both parties for the last 75 years have been stupid.

Putin has been at this business for almost 20 years now. So he knows these issues inside and out. And I think you saw the results of the president's lack of preparation in the press conference, because despite the president's well-documented concern for appearing strong and dominant and being the Alpha male in the room, I think anybody who watched that press conference could see from the outset that Vladimir Putin was in control. He was the dominant presence, and the president was much more uncertain and hesitant and self-absorbed.

And it began with the very first question which was asked by a journalist from Interfax news agency in Russia, a Russian journalist who asked the president about the Nord Stream gas pipeline and about gas exports, which is a major initiative, actually, of the president's administration and not a bad thing from a policy point of view. But the president betrayed a total lack of actual knowledge of the issue and made it clear he had just been using the Nord Stream 2 issue from the previous week as a convenient cudgel with which to beat Chancellor Angel Merkel  of the Federal Republic of Germany, but that he really didn't have a grip on the issue itself. 

Q: What does this kind of thing due to the foreign service establishment? Does it have any effect on the day-to-day jobs of people that you spent so many years working with? 

Edelman: My former colleague in the foreign service Bill Burns, who was ambassador to Russia and is a good friend, basically said publicly after the press conference that it was the most embarrassing performance by an American president in his memory. And I share that view. I have talked to a number of people in the State Department after Monday's press conference and there was a combination, I would say, of disbelief and demoralization, and moreover, a sort of mystification. It's typical that after a summit like this, there is usually a background briefing by a senior government official—usually an unnamed senior government official—that is given to the press to help them understand what transpired and write accurate news accounts of it. And it is also read very closely by diplomats to try and get a sense of what happened so they can continue on with their work. 

There was a combination of disbelief and demoralization.

In this instance, we're finding out more from the Russian side than we are from the American side, as far as I know, and as of as this moment, I have not seen a briefing from the State Department or the White House. Although the Russian authorities are basically saying, yes, we are ready to move forward with all the things that were agreed in Helsinki, there's not a fact sheet or a document of any kind that wouldn't tell you what was agreed to, and since so much of the conversation went on in the one-on-one between the president and President Putin with only interpreters present, it may be awhile. And it may be that actually senior policymakers like secretary Pompeo and others are themselves not completely aware of what transpired in the conversation between Putin and Trump. 

Q: What are the real world ramifications of some of the disconnects between what the president is saying and what some of the people who work for him are saying? 

Edelman: Well, of course that's a challenge. At presidential meetings, even if they're not officially called summits, most of the work goes on at lower levels—there are just too many issues and too much detail to be handled directly by the presidents. Normally a summit will be carefully planned by teams of people working for the foreign minister of Russia and the secretary of state, who would reach a number of agreements and agreed deliverables for a summit. They would carefully work out a communique, usually that's not finalized until after the meetings take place in late night negotiation over the exact wording of all this to make sure no one gets some unfair unilateral advantage out of it. And that's how the work gets done. This, as I said, has inverted the whole thing. It started at the top, but now there's no guidance, at least on the U.S. side, for people to follow through. So yes, there, there are disconnects. In the press today there are stories about Russian senior military officials offering to meet with Secretary Mattis and Secretary Mattis apparently saying, "Yes, I'm hoping to do that" but not having really any idea about what was agreed to by the president. So yes, it's very hard to make the trains run on time and diplomacy if you don't have some kind of guidance from the top about what happened.

It's very hard to make the trains run on time and diplomacy if you don't have some kind of guidance from the top about what happened.

Q: Is this part of a larger pattern of President Trump's role as disruptor, someone who doesn't follow the normal procedures? Will the American public start to see any ramifications that affect their everyday lives?

Edelman: I think this happened already. The picture of the president of United States calling into question the unanimous conclusions of his own intelligence community and agreeing with the president of Russia, who's a former KGB agent, was disturbing to lots of Americans. As I said, it led to an outpouring of criticism from a number of pretty stalwart Republicans who been very supportive of President Trump including Speaker Ryan, Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the daughter of former Vice President Cheney, Senators Bob Frum and Jeff Jeff Flake. I was out with a Tweet very quickly.

And I think some of that is beginning to sink in with the public. As for President Trump being a disrupter, that's certainly the way he portrays himself and his administration likes to portray him. No doubt he is being a disruptive influence, and under certain circumstances, I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing. I think there are certainly times when it's appropriate to disrupt the normal order of business and try to shift things. But some of what President Trump does seems to be disruption for its own sake rather than with any particular strategic end in mind. And some of the disruption is executed in a way that has knock on consequences and second and third order consequences, which I don't think the administration intends or the president intends and with which they then have to deal. 

Some of it's just, frankly, the disorganization and incompetence of his administration. This is an administration that remains understaffed in both the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and elements of the National Security Council. There's been unprecedented bureaucratic churn in the administration in terms of resignations, firings—comings and goings from the administration—and that's given the policy execution piece of this a very shambolic kind of quality. And that's some of what the president is trying to manage as well. It's his own creation in some sense because the national security act of 1947 allows each president to kind of create the national security decision-making bureaucracy in his own own image. And this one definitely is being organized and executed in the image of President Trump, which is to say there's not a lot of normal order. 

Some of what President Trump does seems to be disruption for its own sake rather than with any particular strategic end in mind. 

Q: It seems as if since the end of World War II, we've had a bipartisan consensus that America would and should take a leadership role in the world. Are we seeing the dissolution of a longstanding policy that America would take on the burdens and costs of leadership?

Edelman: Well, it's easy to look back at the history of American foreign relations since 1945 through rose tinted glasses. Having been a veteran of 30 years in different administrations, I've seen big partisan differences about foreign policy and big fights about it politically. But having said that, those fights largely were within the ambit of a broad agreement along the lines that you suggested. There was a lot of debate about tactics and specific policies, but the strategy was based on a system, that the U.S. largely created, of political security institutions, that is to say alliances: a multilateral European alliance in NATO, and then our bilateral security relationships in East Asia, trading relationships with the Republic of Korea and with Japan and with the Republic of China at one time, with Taiwan, before normalizations took place in 1979, as well as the sort of special relationships that we cultivated with Israel and Egypt and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and more recently with the United Arab Emirates—and with Iran at one point before the Iranian revolution in 1979. 

That whole system of political security ties and the economic arrangements that we helped create—with global rules for trade, first under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then under the World Trade Organization, its successor, along with the other international economic institutions, which we largely created, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, etc.—that system did lead to an amazing increase in global prosperity and the Western triumph in the Cold War. And that system is now under enormous stress because  the president basically doesn't believe in it, as best one can tell from his statements. 

Q: Where do we go from here?

Edelman: I think a lot of damage is being done to these traditional ties and institutions. They're pretty robust, I have to say, and I think they can take a bit of buffeting, but I don't think any of us really knows how big of buffeting they take before they collapse. I'm reminded of the film footage you may have seen of a bridge in Seattle called Galloping Girdy, which was caught up in a giant wind storm back, I think, in the 1930s, and it sways and sways and eventually it does collapse. I don't know that we've gotten to the point of Galloping Girdy yet, but certainly these institutions are being subject to a lot of stress, and if they do begin to crack and collapse, I think what you're likely to see is a much more disorderly world.

A lot of damage is being done to these traditional ties and institutions.

You're likely to see increased prices for consumer goods because of a unresolved trade war that is brewing, with the tariffs that are being imposed. So I think you're gonna see  disrupted trade, which will have a slowing effect on the American economy. When you think about it, the president claims as his one big achievement the tax cut that was enacted by the Congress in December, but tariffs are a tax, so what he and his colleagues in the Congress have given with one hand, they're taking away with the other. And that will start to have political effects, too. And that will have a discernible effect on a lot of Americans.