"I've given up on your president," Putin said to then-Exxon chief Rex Tillerson, who would later become President Trump's secretary of state. "I'll wait for your next president and see if I can get along with him."
Less than a year into Obama's second term, the U.S.-Russia relationship was frayed. The U.S. had annulled a bilateral meeting with Putin, a rebuke of Russia's move to grant asylum to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who disclosed top-secret American surveillance programs. The "reset" that the Cold War adversaries had declared shortly after Obama took office was coming to an end, hastened by the summit's cancellation.
As Tillerson later would tell Trump, "The only thing Putin understands is truth and power," part of a long game seeking to destabilize and remake the post-World War II order. Putin, Tillerson said, "wakes up every morning asking, 'Where is America having problems? Let's go there now and make it worse.'"
