Editorials of The Times

It’s good for American presidents to meet with adversaries, to clarify differences and resolve disputes. But when President Donald Trump sits down with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Finland next month, it will be a meeting of kindred spirits, and that’s a problem.

One would think that at a tête-à-tête with the Russian autocrat, the president of the United States would take on some of the major concerns of America and its closest allies. Say, for instance, Putin’s seizure of Crimea and attack on Ukraine, which led to punishing international sanctions. But at the Group of 7 meeting in Quebec this month, Trump reportedly told his fellow heads of state that Crimea is Russian because everyone there speaks that language. And, of course, Trump aides talked to Russian officials about lifting some sanctions even before he took office.

One would hope that the president of the United States would let Putin know that he faces a united front of Trump and his fellow NATO leaders, with whom he would have met days before the summit in Helsinki. But Axios reported that during the meeting in Quebec, Trump said, “NATO is as bad as NAFTA,” the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is one of Trump’s favorite boogeymen.

Certainly the president would mention that even the people he appointed to run America’s intelligence services believe unequivocally that Putin interfered in the 2016 election to put him in office and is continuing to undermine American democracy. Right? But on Thursday morning, Trump tweeted, “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!”

More likely, Trump will congratulate Putin, once again, for winning another term in a sham election, as he did in March, even though his aides explicitly warned him not to. And he has already proposed readmitting Russia to the Group of 7, from which it was ousted after the Ukraine invasion.

Summits once tended to be carefully scripted, and presidents were attended by senior advisers and American interpreters. At dinner during a Group of 20 meeting last July, Trump walked over to Putin and had a casual conversation with no other American representative present. He later said they discussed adoptions — the same issue that he falsely claimed was the subject of a meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 between his representatives and Russian operatives who said they had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

It’s clear that Trump isn’t a conventional president but instead one intent on eroding institutions that undergird democracy and peace. Trump “doesn’t believe that the U.S. should be part of any alliance at all” and believes that “permanent destabilization creates American advantage,” according to unnamed administration officials quoted by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.

Such thinking goes further than most Americans have been led to believe were Trump’s views on issues central to allied security. He has often given grudging lip service to supporting NATO, even while complaining frequently about allies’ military spending and unfair trade policies.

The tensions Trump has sharpened with our allies should please Putin, whose goal is to fracture the West and assert Russian influence in places where the Americans and Europeans have played big roles, like the Middle East, the Balkans and the Baltic states.

Yet despite growing anxieties among European allies, Trump is relying on his advisers less than ever because, “He now thinks he’s mastered this,” one senior member of Congress said in an interview. That’s a chilling thought given his inability, so far, to show serious progress on any major security issue. Despite Trump’s talk of quick denuclearization after his headline-grabbing meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, experts say satellite imagery shows the North is actually improving its nuclear capability.

While the White House hasn’t disclosed an agenda for the Putin meeting, there’s a lot the two leaders should be discussing, starting with Russian cyberintrusions. Trump, though, has implied that Putin could help the United States guard against election hacking. And although Congress last year mandated sweeping sanctions against Russia to deter such behavior, Trump has failed to implement many of them.

In a similar vein, should Trump agree to unilaterally lift sanctions imposed after Moscow invaded Ukraine and started a war, it would further upset alliance members, which joined the United States in imposing sanctions at some cost to themselves. Moreover, what would deter Putin from pursuing future land grabs?

Trump could compound that by canceling military exercises, as he did with South Korea after the meeting with Kim, and by withdrawing American troops that are intended to keep Russia from aggressive action in the Baltics.

Another fraught topic is Syria. Trump has signaled his desire to withdraw American troops from Syria, a move that would leave the country more firmly in the hands of President Bashar Assad and his two allies, Russia and Iran. Russia, in particular, is calling the shots on the battlefield and in drafting a political settlement that could end the fighting, presumably after opposition forces are routed.

What progress could be made at this summit, then? Trump and Putin may find it easier to cooperate in preventing a new nuclear arms race by extending New START, a treaty limiting strategic nuclear weapons that expires in 2021.

Another priority: bringing Russia back into compliance with the INF treaty, which eliminated all U.S. and Soviet ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, until Russia tested and deployed a prohibited cruise missile.

Trump’s top national security advisers are more cleareyed about the Russian threat than he is. So are the Republicans who control the Senate. They have more responsibility than ever to try to persuade Trump that the country’s security is at stake when he meets Putin and that he should prepare carefully for the encounter.

Conservatives on the Supreme Court have been signaling for years that they would like to destroy public-sector unions. On Wednesday, they handed down a ruling that aims to do just that. But the justices and right-wing groups that pushed for this outcome could soon find that it will not be so easy to suppress teachers, social workers and other government employees who in recent months have taken to the streets to demand raises and better working conditions.

Overturning a unanimous 41-year-old decision, the court ruled 5 to 4 that state governments could not force public employees who don’t join unions to pay fees that support collective bargaining. More than 20 states require these so-called fair-share or agency fees, which the court has upheld several times since that earlier ruling.

But writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. said that the court had been wrong all this time and was violating the First Amendment rights of government workers by insisting they support unions whose positions they might not agree with. Or, in other words, someone’s free speech rights can be violated by making the worker pay a union to do the very thing that it was formed to do. Right. It’s hard not to agree with Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote in a sharp dissent that the majority was “weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory policy.”

This decision, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, will clearly hurt public-sector unions, the most important bastion of a labor movement that has lost millions of members over the last several decades. Public-sector unions could lose between a tenth and a third of their members, experts say, as more workers decide to become free riders, enjoying raises, pensions and other benefits unions win through collective bargaining without having to bear any of the cost of those negotiations. Over time, as more workers decline to pay fees, the remaining members will be forced to pay more, and unions will have to provide fewer services and may become weaker.

Historically, unions played a crucial role in lifting living standards for millions of workers and creating a middle class. Many economists believe that their decline in recent decades contributed to anemic wage growth and rising income inequality.

That would be no problem for the conservative groups that funded lawsuits to bring this issue to the court. For his part, Alito had made clear that he was looking for the perfect opportunity to strike down the court’s 1977 decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education.

Unions will not disappear without a fight. Public-sector unions have already been organizing members and nonmembers to limit their losses. Such efforts will be buoyed by the growing dissatisfaction among workers, who are frustrated with stagnant wages, long hours and poor working conditions despite a growing economy and, in many places, generous government incentives for corporations and rich taxpayers. The recent teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona demonstrate a groundswell of dissatisfaction even in conservative states where lawmakers have systematically weakened unions in recent years. It’s perhaps only a matter of time before that dissatisfaction translates into a powerful political base to tap.

Lawmakers who believe that collective bargaining is the best way to strengthen American workers can pass measures like those approved in California and New Jersey that require government agencies to let union representatives meet new employees at orientation events, which should help stem their losses.

Benjamin Sachs, a labor expert at Harvard Law School, also suggests that states change how unions are compensated for collective bargaining expenses. He argues that even though workers pay union fees, that money ultimately comes from governments because the fees are deducted from the paychecks of public employees. State and local governments could solve the problem created by the Supreme Court’s Janus decision by paying unions directly for their expenses and reducing worker pay by an equivalent amount. Of course, while mathematically straightforward, this change could be difficult to implement. Some lawmakers might balk at paying unions directly, and workers might resent earning less, even if take-home pay is not affected. It will be up to unions to make the case, however, that it’s a move toward the greater good for worker protections.

There are no easy or quick responses to the challenges this persistent right-wing attack has posed for unions and their supporters. It will take the right political strategy and perseverance to defend hard-won gains. But workers have been in a far worse position in the past. It never hurts to remember that it took decades of bloody struggle to win the right to unionize in the first place.