For Trump, business and politics is a macho contest. It was obvious during the campaign that he seeks to establish his male dominance by patronizing his opponents, giving them insulting monikers and commenting on their purported manly shortfalls. He's done the same with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. He's doing it with Putin, too. "Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do," he tweeted on Wednesday -- a phrase calculated to offend.
Trump's machismo fits in well with Republicans' traditional Russia hawkishness. The party isn't dragging a reluctant Trump along. Nor is Special Counsel Robert Mueller's collusion investigation (which has, so far, unearthed no trace of collusion) making Trump act out on Russia as forcefully as he has: He knows he can't make Mueller go away by bombing Syria or expelling diplomats. Trump is out to prove that he, not Putin, is the 800-pound gorilla, the alpha male.
The logic of a macho confrontation is that it escalates to a fight unless one side or the other backs down. Putin, however, has a talent for stretching out conflicts he cannot win outright. He'll use the hostilities to avoid being treated as a lame duck president in what, constitutionally, is his last term in office and to further his long-standing dream of returning exported Russian capital to the country. Putin's advantage is that he automatically outlasts Trump if the president isn't re-elected in 2020.
More than ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Russia need to set the boundaries of their hostile engagement. The festering macho conflict will ensure that the two nations will clash over and over again. One big test of whether there are any grown men in the war rooms of both Washington and Moscow is whether any U.S. or allied action against Assad is coordinated with Russia on a military level, as happened with last year's missile attack. Let's hope so.
Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
This column was provided by Bloomberg News.