It's not wrong for Donald Trump to trust Vladimir Putin

Trust is only an effective foreign policy tool if it's established slowly and carefully

Donald Trump recently said in an interview with The Sunday Times that he will start his presidency trusting both Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel, before adding that such trust might not last long. Given Russian interference in the US presidential elections and the general distrust of Putin in the West, Trump’s excessively pro-Putin statements and his readiness to trust his Russian counterpart naturally created some backlash.

But where states don’t trust each other, personal trust between their leaders is often crucial. And Trump is only proposing to do what many of his predecessors did, both in the Cold